Our 10 Favorite Magical Objects From The Enigmatic Mind of Architect and Designer François Dallegret →

Design is important because it reinvigorates our everyday objects with new life. A good designer does not just make a bed; he makes a bed into a crucifix made out of sot polyurethane. A good architect does not just redesign a basement; he turns the basement into a drugstore/nightclub. We are speaking of the multi-talented architect and artist François Dallegret. The French-born, Montreal-based designer studied architecture at the famous Beaux-Arts in Paris before he tired of their strict, conformist imaginations of what spaces and objects might look like. Since the 60s, Dallegret has been experimenting with futuristic and imaginative concepts and materials, creating multifunctional furniture, strange machines, walking cakes, jumping spheres, electrical and inflated garments, and more. On the occasion of the architect's latest exhibition in Los Angeles, here are ten of his most whimsical and fantastic creations. Click here to read more. 

Exclusive Preview Of "Kienholz: Five Car Stud" @ Fondazione Prada in Milan

Milan’s Fondazione Prada presents “Kienholz: Five Car Stud”. The exhibition brings together a selection of artworks by Edward Kienholz and his wife Nancy Reddin Kienholz, including the well known installation that gives the show its title. A self-taught artist from Washington State, Edward Kienholz’s work was described by Germano Celant as “making no attempt to sublimate the meanness and tragedy of life, its condition of loneliness and triviality, but on the contrary using them as a way of highlighting a low and popular universe in which the wasted and the dirty, the depraved and the filthy, represented a new and surprising beauty”. The exhibition features numerous installations and tableaux created by the couple between the early late fifties and the nineties, often directly representing death, violence, war and various kinds of social injustices. Looking at them makes the viewer feel uncomfortable and powerless but, at the same time, turns him into a participating witness as the urge to meticulously explore the details take over: Voyeurism and the power of crude beauty win over the common sense of morality. The main installation, “Five Car Stud”, catapults the viewer into a nightmarish situation, plunging him into a dimension of extreme violence. It recreates a dark, isolated environment, illuminated merely by the headlights of four cars and a pick-up truck,  at the center of which lies an African–American man, surrounded by five white men wearing Halloween masks. The aggressors grab his arms and legs while one of them prepares to castrate him. A woman is forced to watch, shocked and powerless, and a frightened little boy witnesses the scene from the backseat of his father’s car. This work was defined by Kienholz as the representation of “The Burden of Being American”. The exhibition will be on view until December 31 2016 at Fondazione Prada, Largo Isarco 2, Mila. Text and photographs by Sara Kaufman

Anish Kapoor Stainless Steel Sculptures @ Lisson Gallery in Milan

For his first exhibition in Milan’s Lisson Gallery, Anish Kapoor presents a new series of fourteen steel sculptures, stainless and polished, twisted through an unspecified number of degrees. These small scale twists - thirty centimeters by height - are shown for the first time as an entire group, placed together in a room, interacting with one another and with the public by creating fluid reflections, which disrupt and dismantle any stable imagery: their original pre-twisted form becomes impossible to detect and the space around them turns into a surreal mixture of reality and reflection, continuously changing according to one’s vision and perspective . The artist has referred to similar sculptures as “non – objects”, losing themselves almost completely because of their unidentifiable geometry and their highly reflective material. One larger twist (100 cm) is placed outside on the terrace. Just like in some of his best –known works such as the Cloud Gate in Chicago’s and the C-Curve at the Chateau De Versailles, Anish Kapoor once again explores the idea of the curve. In this particular case his twisted forms somehow provide an optical vision of the universe by warping the light on its way through space and tilting our intuition to one side, presenting to the viewer a distorted vision of reality which is totally subjective to his point of view. The exhibition will be on view until July 22nd at Lisson Gallery Milan (via Zenale 3, Milan). text and photographs by Sarah Kaufman

Read Our Interview With Iconic Fashion Designer and Artist Christophe Coppens On Leaving The Fashion World Behind For Art →

One might expect someone with the credentials of Christophe Coppens – internationally acclaimed avant garde fashion designer, official milliner for the Belgian Royal Family, former theatre actor and director, burgeoning artist – to be radically unapproachable. Instead, Coppens shakes your hand warmly, orders iced tea at an outdoor café, talks about his love for cheap avocado toast and the 20s style bungalows in Silverlake. Perhaps this is why Coppens jumped the brutal, fast-paced, capitalist boat of the fashion industry circuit five years ago, abandoning his label to pursue art. Click here to read more. 

Watch The World Premiere of Sui Zhen's Cindy Sherman Inspired Music Video for the Track Take It All Back

Take It All Back is a track off the upcoming album Secretly Susan. As waves lap on the shore in the opening moments of Secretly Susan, you know you're in for a journey. Sui Zhen, aka Susan, aka Melbourne-based Dream Beat artist Becky Sui Zhen, is at the helm. Drifting by tiki beach parties and nostalgic Sound Systems, Becky's ethereally radiant jams lead you on a path to positive enlightenment. Inspired by Japanese Lovers Rock, 80s Electro-Bossanova and Dubby-Lounge Pop which she discovered on holidays in Japan and London as a participant at the Red Bull Music Academy, Secretly Susan is truly a World album wrapped neatly in a an accessible cloak and tied with a bow. The album lands in North America for the very first time June 17th via Twosyllable Records (on exclusive license from Dot Dash/Remote Control) in decadent bubblegum pink vinyl. Click here to preorder. 

Carsten Höller "Doubt" @ Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan

In his works, Carsten Höller investigates the nature of human experience. His settings dismantle not only the traditional concept of art work but also the very idea of experiencing an exhibition or a museum. Visitors are put into a condition of disorientation and confusion, which turns out to be an incredibly productive state of mind. The loss of every certainty is precisely the condition which inspired this particular exhibition: “Doubt”. The “Doubt” starts from the very beginning, when the visitor is asked to choose between two opposite directions (“Y”), both of them leading into long pitch black corridors (“Decision Corridors”). At this point, after having walked through complete darkness for several minutes, the viewer finds himself in the perfect physical and mental condition to access the main room, where all sort of interactive works are placed, from flying machines to carousels, video art and interactive Aquariums, giving the surreal idea of an amusement park. Höller named it “Radical Entertainment”, aiming to reflect both on art as a form of entertainment as well as on fun itself being a dominant aspect in our lives. From the main room once again two different corridors lead to another space, where the exhibition ends with one last work, “Two roaming beds”, which recreates the concept of doubt and uncertainty experimented in the very first part. Carsten Höller "Doubt" will be on view until July 31, 2016 at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Via Chiese 2, 20126 Milano. text and photographs by Sara Kaufman

One Night In Candy Land: Read Our Interview With the Larger Than Life Candy Ken →

His face splattered with Hello Kitty temporary tattoos, a chiseled male hustler body and a thick Austrian accent, Candy Ken is a Harajuku Greek God run through the sieve of a culture on digital overload. If you held a mirror to the teenage zeitgeist of the twenty first century, Candy Ken’s smiling gold grill would be twinkling right back at you. Over the weekend, the Berlin-based performer released his first official album, entitled Real Talk, and he did it as his own manager, promoter and record label. Click here to read more. 

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection @ The Whitney Museum of American Art In New York

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection offers new perspectives on one of art’s oldest genres. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s holdings, the more than two hundred works in the exhibition show changing approaches to portraiture from the early 1900s until today. Bringing iconic works together with lesser-known examples and recent acquisitions in a range of mediums, the exhibition unfolds in eleven thematic sections on the sixth and seventh floors. Some of these groupings concentrate on focused periods of time, while others span the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to forge links between the past and the present. This sense of connection is one of portraiture’s most important aims, whether memorializing famous individuals long gone or calling to mind loved ones near at hand. Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection will be on view until February 12, 2017 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York

Elmgreen and Dragset "Van Gogh's Ear" @ Rockafeller Center in New York

This spring, artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset will transform the Fifth Avenue entrance to the Channel Gardens at Rockefeller Center with a large-scale new work. Van Gogh’s Ear is a sculpture, which takes the form of a swimming pool sitting upright. On view until June 3, 2016 at 5th Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets. photograph by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

On the Hunt for Conservation: Read Our Interview With Dylan Johnston On The Great Python Challenge →

Dylan Johnston has documented the Florida Python Challenge, one of the Florida Wildlife Commission’s more successful attempts to eradicate the invasive and evasive snake, for the past three years. In 2013, he began the project after mention from a friend in Sarasota, only a few hours from the river of grass, and has worked on the project since, immersing himself in the unforgiving environment that is the Everglades. Johnston, from Ft. Pierce, has worked on plenty of projects and assignments in his home-state, detailing the life of working in junkyards to rigging ballyhoos while trolling for pelagic species in the Gulf-stream just off Southern Florida’s east coast. Click here to read more. 

Dodging a Bullet: Read Jeffrey Deitch's Words On Artist Tom Sachs On The Occasion of His Solo Exhibition →

“How did these get here!?” I was shocked to see a pile of stickers on my gallery reception desk in the Spring of 1996 with the outrageously provocative phrase “Nuke the Swiss” printed above a red cross. “They were left there by that funny guy who comes in here all the time,” my staff explained. A few weeks later, I was there when the culprit walked in, smirking as he handed me a fresh stack of Nuke the Swiss stickers. His engaging manner somehow neutralized the egregious content of his free art. This was my first introduction to Tom Sachs, who twenty years later, still visits during his walks around the neighborhood, and who continues to perfect his fusion of radical conceptual performance, Modernist idealism, bricolage and provocation. Click here to read more.