Couture From Home: An Inside Look At The Making Of Alexander McQueen's Pre-SS21 Collection

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As all offices, ateliers and factories were closed over lockdown, the Alexander McQueen design team were sent stock fabric to their homes, which was over-printed, over-dyed and renewed.

This collection harks back to the early days of McQueen and a free, make-do-and-mend spirit. Garments – from signature sharply cut masculine-inspired tailoring to prom dresses - were cut by hand at kitchen tables, fabric was dip-dyed in gardens. A mid-twentieth century silhouette – sweetheart necklines, soft shoulders and overblown skirts – is complimented by a hyper-feminine colour palette in shades of pink, from albion to fuchsia rose, and red, punctuated by classic black. Asymmetric hand-draped silks and exploded bows nod to the haute couture tradition finishing an audaciously romantic look.

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A dress with off-the-shoulder drape and a tiered skirt in washed silk organza dip-dyed albion pink and black.

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A double-layered tuxedo jacket in black wool silk with a wrapped bow peplum in albion pink micro-faille and cigarette trousers in black wool silk with a black satin tuxedo stripe.

 
 

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An oyster ruffle dress with a high neck and scalloped back in washed organza dip-dyed albion  pink and black.

 
 

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An asymmetric, floor-length dress with an exploded skirt volume in washed calico silk organza with sketchbook hand embroidery over a skeletal corset in nude silk tulle. The embroidery was inspired by drawings in the notebooks of the Alexander McQueen design studio teams.

Friday Playlist: Hipgnosis

Enrique Metinides, A Woman Grieves over Her Dead Boyfriend, Stabbed in Chapultepec Park While Resisting Robbers, Mexico City, 1985

Enrique Metinides, A Woman Grieves over Her Dead Boyfriend, Stabbed in Chapultepec Park While Resisting Robbers, Mexico City, 1985

A warm dive into a hipgnotic bath of repetitive grooves, atmospheric tracks and metallic vibrations. Back seat, leather upholstery, dark rooms, flashing lights. A meditation on forgetting who you are on a Saturday night. The dream of vanishing.

Listen on Spotify: A warm dive into a hipgnotic bath of repetitive grooves, atmospheric tracks and metallic vibrations. Back seat, leather upholstery, dark rooms, flashing lights. A meditation on forgetting who you are on a Saturday night. The dream of vanishing.

Watch S.R. Studio's Debut "Apparitions" For Paris Haute Couture Week

California Couture. A collection created in America, reflecting America. Shot in Los Angeles on January 19, 2021, the last day of the Trump presidency. 

The Puritan and Pilgrims, traveling to America in the 17th century, viewed the United States as a “Redeemer Nation” — a belief in the country’s divinely ordained redemptive role in the world. It is a narrative being profoundly questioned today, inseparable from the enduring inequalities and ongoing threat of violence framed as patriotism.  

Responding to the history of the United States — imagined and real — Sterling Ruby explores the intersection of fashion, art, craft and culture for this first haute couture collection created at the invitation of the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, Paris. Silhouettes, shapes, garment archetypes reference American heritage: Puritan collars, styles of dress inextricable from colonialism, neocolonialism, and religious persecution. These contrast with the uniforms of modern America: references to skate wear, workwear, business wear. 

creative direction and editing by Ruby

Watch Part 2 of The Broad Museum's Time Decorated: The Musical Influences of Jean-Michel Basquiat Featuring James Spooner

“Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time” Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988). The Broad announces Time Decorated: The Musical Influences of Jean-Michel Basquiat, a three-part video series dedicated to the famed New York City artist. The video series includes three segments, Jazz and Bebop, Punk and No Wave, and 2 Bebop to Hip-Hop via Basquiat, where musicians, creatives and scholars discuss the impact of each music genre on Basquiat’s now iconic style. All three segments were filmed at The Broad, in newly installed Basquiat galleries displaying the museum’s uniquely deep representation of the artist’s work. The "Punk and No Wave" segment, hosted by James Spooner, co-founder of Afro-Punk and who ran an underground club on Canal Street in the early ‘90’s, features tunes by James Chance and The Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Basquiat’s band Gray, Liquid Liquid, DNA, and Mars. Click here to read a conversation between Spooner and The Broad’s director of audience engagement, Ed Patuto.

Time and Intent: A Solo Exhibition By Alex Heilbron @ Meliksetian Briggs In Los Angeles

The five paintings featured in Alex Heilbron’s Time and Intent are part of a larger body of work she began prior to, and completed after, the onset of the pandemic. The various patterning techniques that guide this work facilitate distillation of concepts like adolescence, decay and movement into notions of temporality. Not unlike the specular aspect of a graph, these paintings find a balance in transition between dualisms: order and chaos, active and passive, before and after.

Time and Intent is on view through March 27 @ Meliksetian | Briggs 313 N Fairfax Avenue

Danny Fox's The Sweet and Burning Hills @ Alexander Berggruen In New York

Danny Fox’s new paintings at Alexander Berggruen capture the conflicting spirit of the Hollywood Hills through boldly-rendered expressive portraiture, mystical elements, and allusions to smoke and fire. Fox blends domestic imagery with influences from his natural surroundings to create eerily striking articulations of the human psyche. In the show’s namesake 2019 painting The Sweet and Burning Hills, a figure lets a mask hang below her chin to reveal her face, seemingly indifferent to the fire-teeming background. The ghost-like transparent outline of her body suggests her transience within the burning environment, or perhaps she exists as a distant memory. As the figure is impermanent and atemporal, so too is the landscape immortalized in painting while burning to ash. photographs by Dario Lasagni

The Sweet and Burning Hills is on view by appointment through February 26 @ Alexander Berggruen 1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3

Steven Harwick's SKiNFLiCK Solo Show @ URSA NYC

i’M DiRTY LiKE iCE CREAM MELTED iN BEDSHEETS AND FRESH MUD SQUiSHED OUT OF CROCS HOLES. YOU ARE HiGH OCTANE TUBE SOCKS iN PiSS STAiNED BRiEFS. GiVE ME YOUR GOLD TEETH, i’LL KEEP THEM iN EVERY POCKET. i’M CUM RiCH LiKE A MATCHSTiCK ANARCHY SYMBOL ABOUT TO GET LiT.

SKiNFLiCK is on view virtually and for in-person appointments @ URSA NYC

7 Never-Before-Seen Works By Rosie Lee Tompkins @ Anthony Meier Fine Arts In San Francisco

American artist, Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936–2006) is considered one of the greatest quiltmakers of all time and one of the century’s greatest artists. The seven artworks on view at Anthony Meier Fine Arts date from 1974 to 2006, the year of the artist’s death. This significant exhibition coincides with a major retrospective of her work at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and includes a newly commissioned essay by Lawrence Rinder, the longtime champion of Tompkins and former Director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Rosie Lee Tompkins is the pseudonym of quilter Effie Mae Howard, who carefully guarded her privacy after her rise to national prominence in the late 1990s. Born on September 6, 1936 to a sharecropping family in southeastern Arkansas, she learned quilting from her mother as a child but did not begin to practice the craft seriously until the 1980s, when she was living in the Bay Area city of Richmond. Tompkins was a devout member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and credited God with her uncanny sense of color. Many of her quilts were made with family members or friends in mind, and can be seen as prayers on their behalf, including her sons.

Few of Tompkins’ quilts conform to the traditional scale of a bed covering, a byproduct of the conceptual logic inherent in each piece. Her quilts are characterized by the variation in scale of the triangles and squares used in her patterns, creating “asymmetrical forms that pull, crumble, and bend,” says Rinder. Tompkins “transformed everything she touched with her improvisatory piecing and unerring sense of color, composition and scale,” notes critic Roberta Smith. “In the still-unfolding field of African-American quilt-making, she has no equal.”

Rosie Lee Tompkins is on view through February 19 @ Anthony Meier Fine Arts 1969 California Street, San Francisco

I Contain Multitudes Group Show @ Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery In New York

I Contain Multitudes is a group show featuring the works of Jules Gimbrone, Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin, and Jennifer Sirey. The microbiome — all the bacteria, fungi, protozoa and viruses that cohabitate our genetic biomass, actually outweigh us by volume, some estimate that there are over 10 times as many microbial cells than human cells in and on each one of us. The microbiome is invisible to the eye but visible to our sense of smell, taste and touch, and visible in human culture as well. From the foods that we eat and the ways we digest, to the ways we process and interpret information and construct identity, and to whom we are attracted, the microbiome is influencing us and participating in our relations to the world. This show seeks to explore ways that several artists have pointed to, cooperated, or worked in tandem with microbial life in the making and context of works of art and culture. The title originally comes from “Song of Myself, 51” by Walt Whitman, and more recently used by science writer Ed Yong to title his book about the microbiome.

This exhibition will include a special series of KLAUSGALLERY.cloud editions focusing on the various practices of each artist. New editions of the online component will launch throughout the month.

I Contain Multitudes is on view through February 20 @ Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery 54 Ludlow Street, New York

Michael Stamm Presents "so super sorry sir!" @ Shulamit Nazarian In Los Angeles

The paintings in Michael Stamm’s “so super sorry sir!” revel in their idiosyncratic, contradictory attitude toward morality, sexuality, mental health, and contemporary cultural politics. They feature an unlikely cast of characters—ranging from the Devil to an anthropomorphic hand—whose disparate senses of virtue and spirituality often clash with societal convention. At once clinging to life and hurtling toward annihilation, the artist questions what self-actualization looks like in the face of an overly righteous and emotionally precarious world.

The Devil appears as a surrogate for various archetypes—a conspiratorial friend, a scorned enemy, or at times, the artist himself. He is at once a foe to be vanquished and a sly, picaresque hero, providing an infinite set of entry points for the viewer to project their own definitions of “right” and “wrong”. In the titular painting of the show, “so super sorry sir!”, the Devil takes the role of a hysterical martyr, at once offering his patriarchal tormentor a flower, while stabbing himself with a sword. The painting reimagines a memory of a forced apology extracted from the artist by a homophobic teacher. Instead of flatly submitting, the Devil flamboyantly and sibilantly disobeys. Deploying icons of the Virgin Mary interspersed with images of historical gay villains, the work indulges both the aggression of sarcastic defiance and the kinky masochism of self-flagellation. Throughout the exhibition, the Devil, ever at odds with his environment and always nude, exuberantly plays out the iconoclasm of being a queer person. This dissonant, ever changing position associated with queerness may deny an easily resolved identity or moral stance but, ironically, is exactly what allows for the possible reconciliation of conflicting desires.

so super sorry sir! is on view through March 6 @ Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles 616 N La Brea Ave

Cammie Staros's What Will Have Being @ Shulamit Nazarian In Los Angeles

Over the past decade, Cammie Staros has investigated the ways in which classical antiquities have come to represent an origin story of Western art history. While continuing to address the historical narrative surrounding these objects, the body of work in What Will Have Being focuses more on the prescience of ancient artifacts – how their treatment might foretell a possible future of today’s objects. Relics and ruins, which outlast the societies that made them, emphasize both the achievements and the hubris of humanity. But by shifting our contextual understanding of these objects, by considering how meaning is made, we can begin to understand an alternative narrative. The works in What Will Have Being not only question our understanding of contemporary political and environmental instabilities, they also poignantly consider how our current moment will be remembered, and what kind of world it will produce for tomorrow.

What Will Have Being is on view through March 6 @ Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles 616 N La Brea Ave

Sue Williams Paintings And Collages @ 303 Gallery In New York

In 2020, the brutal reality of living in the waning days of American Empire has allowed Williams to consider how we might have arrived at this point. Her new paintings are suffused with images of colonial times: disembodied Pilgrim clogs, Tudor cabins, horses outfitted with blinders, the literal nuts & bolts that prefigured the industrial revolution, Betsy Ross as a dinosaur. The suggestion that America is founded on violence and manipulation, that the post-truth, post-Trump, post-COVID world is not an anomaly but a continuation of a status quo built over the past 400 years, doesn't seem far-fetched. A painting titled "Land Of Profit and Coincidence" would resonate equally in 1620 or 2020.

There is a wry and impertinent classicism in Williams' compositions - at first glance, they suggest the kind of maps early land surveyors might use. They also may intimate the strewn wreckage of a natural disaster, here the relentless and sadistic subversion of democracy, the American dream, and E Pluribus Unum. Couched in the archetypal imagery of our noble forefathers, of amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties, American idyll itself becomes Machiavellian. Williams herself sums it up with two quotes: "The American people are the most brainwashed in the world" (Adam Curtis), and a hopeful note courtesy of Woody Guthrie: "You fascists never gonna win."

Sue Williams’ solo exhibition is on view through January 30 @ 303 Gallery 555 W 21st Street

Infinite Games Group Show @ Capitain Petzel In Berlin

Infinite Games takes its starting point from a recent project initiated by Capitain Petzel during the Corona lockdown called Rhizome. Among the works presented online and later at the gallery was one of Sarah Morris’ films, Finite and Infinite Games. The work posits two opposing worldviews of politics, thinking, strategy and even creativity. The exhibition encompasses 13 artists whose practices reflect the power that the deviant, ambiguous and disjointed can play both in art and society as a whole. Featured artists: Jadé Fadojutimi, Ximena Garrido-lecca, Stefanie Heinze, Jacqueline Humprhies, Sanya Kantarovsky, Rodney McMillian, Sarah Morris, Virginia Overton, Laura Owens, Jorge Pardo, Seth Price, Pieter Schoolwerth, Wim Wenders.

Infinite Games is on view through January 30 @ Capitain Petzel Karl-Marx-Allee 45 10178 Berlin

David Hicks Presents Inaugural Solo Exhibition @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery In Los Angeles

Seed, David Hick’s exhibition of ceramics and drawings represents the artist’s first solo show with Diane Rosenstein Gallery. This body of work is closely connected to the landscape surrounding Hicks’ studio and home in Central San Joaquin Valley, a largely agricultural area in California. The artist writes,

While not tethered to a focused realism of nature’s shapes and natural development, my approach is more a loose conversation with natural form; one that addresses my interpretations of growth, irregularity and the movements of nature.

David Hicks’ multifaceted terracotta works ‘grow’ up and around the space in which they are installed. Dionysian ‘Offerings’ take the artist’s maximalist approach to an extreme, depicting heaping plates of vegetal forms—some rising four feet high off the floor—doused in thick glazes, often captured in mid-drip. Plant-like forms also appear as small talismanic objects the artist calls ‘Clippings’. In places, the forms appear more bodily, like heads or organs, offering a reminder that we, too, are a part of the landscape.

Seed is on view by appointment through February 13 @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery 831 N Highland Avenue

Highways Performance Space Presents Film Maudit 2.0 Virtual Festival

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Film Maudit 2.0 is a film festival dedicated to outré films inspired by the legendary artist Jean Cocteau’s “1949 Festival Du Film Maudit”, which celebrated a group of films that were criminally overlooked and neglected at the time. Taking its title from the French expression meaning “cursed films,” this showcase of counter-cinema blends together narrative, documentary, and experimental films that in their style and/or subject matter, are deliberately bold, confrontational, troubling, and/or shocking. 

The Film Maudit 2.0 festival features over 125 works of cinema from 25 countries including films rarely if ever, seen in festivals: works addressing sociopolitical issues and taboo subject matter that challenges conventional artistic assumptions and sexual mores.

Film Maudit 2.0 is free and available to view online January 12 – 24

Hannah Epstein's Kill Your Captors @ Steve Turner In Los Angeles

Kill Your Captors, Hannah Epstein’s latest solo exhibition at Steve Turner, features new hooked rugs, most of which she created after moving into an 1886 church in Mahone Bay, a small town one hour from Halifax. The hysteria of 2020 and meme culture that ensued are depicted in some works, while others depict monsters looking on. The meme works relate to Cancel Culture, Elon Musk and Grimes, Xi Jinpeng’s China, sacred cows and hyperstimulation. Battles are brewing and monsters are watching.  

Kill Your Captors is on view through February 6 at Steve Turner, 6830 Santa Monica Blvd

Lee Bul's Utopia Saved @ The Manege Central Exhibition Hall In St. Petersburg

The multifaceted work of Lee Bul has in many respects defined the development trajectory of contemporary Asian Art and has also had a significant influence on the contemporary artistic process all around the world. The artist uses icons and tropes from utopian modernism, transforming, allegorising, and juxtaposing them in her own creative works. She engages with utopian modernism with empathy and originality, with critique and imagination. 

The Utopia Saved exhibition is Lee Bul’s first solo exhibition to be held in Russia, and is one of Lee Bul’s most personal artistic expressions. It is the first time that the artist has so fully explained to the public the sources of the current phase of development of her artistic path and the influence that the Russian avant-garde has had on her work.

Utopia Saved is on view through January 31 @ The Manege Central Exhibition Hall, St Petersburg

Friday Playlist: Counter Cortisol

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Hang in there baby! 2021 is off to a rocky start, so here are some tracks to curb that cortisol rush. Because we all need a little calm after the storm.

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Clayton Schiff's Small World @ 56 Henry in New York

Et quid amabo nisi quod ænigma est?[*] 
[What shall I love if not the enigma?] 
-Giorgio de Chirico 

Clayton Schiff’s paintings seem like representations of dreams. The  artist gathers impressions of an unconscious that distorts, displaces, enlarges, and compresses experiences accumulated while awake. His haunting iconography recalls the symbolism of Arnold Böcklin, the alienation and anxiety of Edvard Munch, and Leonora Carrington’s fairylands. Yet Schiff’s fantastical creatures and strange landscapes also have a subtlety and lightness that is playful and even humorous recalling Dr. Seuss. 

Schiff’s first solo exhibition with 56 Henry speaks of isolation and disaffection, and champions the irrational and poetic, the enigmatic and arcane. The color palette is muted; soft tones prevail, adding to the work’s otherworldly quality. The paintings often feel empty and sparse, inviting comparisons to Giorgio de Chirico’s dystopian, alienating land and cityscapes.

Small World is on view through January 17 @ 56 Henry Street New York, NY 10002