Highlights From The Inaugural Aspen Art Fair At The Historic Jerome Hotel

In the former silver mining town of Aspen, Colorado, art week brings an exotically curious international crowd. Billionaire collector home tours, dinners, exhibitions, activations, and art fairs take over the tiny, quaint city nine-thousand feet in the Rockies. The air is thin, rare, and rich in this alpine ecosystem of nature that meets the nostalgia of the American West with the hyper-commerce of the 21st century. A newcomer on the scene, The Aspen Art Fair, feels like it's been there all along. Ideally situated at the historic five-star Jerome Hotel, which opened in 1889 and is now part of Auberge Resorts’ portfolio, the fair presented thirty international exhibitors and curatorial projects from more than twelve countries. Cozily tucked into bottom-floor bungalows, the fair follows the grand tradition of hotel art fairs, like the Gramercy International Art Fair at the Gramercy Hotel in New York and Felix at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.  Co-founded by art world veterans Becca Hoffman and Robert Chase, the Aspen Art Fair included a stellar list of galleries, including Galerie Gmurzynska from Zürich, Perrotin, and Southern Guild from Cape Town, South Africa. With the general art market in a post-pandemic slump, Hoffman, who is also the founder of the women-led 74th Arts, which organizes global art fair experiences in cities around the globe, knows full well the power of boutique. “We need to rethink how we connect on culture, in citywide environments. How do we have more intimate opportunities for engagement, education, connection, and commerce?” Hoffman—tough as nails and ultra-savvy—told us on the third to last day of the fair. With Aspen being 1,390 times smaller than the population of New York and a super concentration of centimillionaires, Aspen is the perfect environment for art and commerce. With works ranging from Picasso to Paola Pivi to Fairfield Porter and Richard Diebenkorn, the Aspen Art Fair is both refreshing and exhilarating.

HOT AND BOTHERED GROUP SHOW COMES TO AN END

Marielle Chabal, 'QUEENS project. Moodboards #1 and #2', 2024, 'Hot and bothered (Nightmares in a bed full of pillows)' group show, 2024, Galerie Alberta Pane, Paris

Completing their exhibition July 20th, The Alberta Pane Gallery presents the group show Hot and bothered (Nightmares in a bed full of pillows), featuring the work of three international artists: Guendalina Cerruti, Marielle Chabal, and Davide Sgambaro. Gathered together for the first time in a group exhibition, the works of Cerruti, Chabal, and Sgambaro focus on the young generation’s existential concerns. Through various media the artists investigate similar issues, trying to unveil doubts and anxieties linked to an uncertain future. With their practices they attempt to propose new solutions to contemporary society’s disillusions, while using an absurd and sarcastic approach. Each art piece is unique and varies in execution, yet clearly displays their unified message through multiple different artistic approaches that manage to convey the evolution of self, starting at the absurdity and wonder of childhood to a more hollow and bitterly aware adulthood. The group exhibition is an exploration of identity and the growing pains that come with leaving your youth while still managing to carry that sense of creativity throughout your journey.

Hot and Bothered is on view until July 20th @ Alberta Pane Gallery 44-47, rue de Montmorency 75003, Paris, France, for more information, visit their website

Sharon Stone's Eternal Failure Is An Eternal Success

Courtesy Gallery 181 Fremont Residences San Francisco/Moanalani Jeffrey Photo Agency

John Steinbeck once said, “San Francisco is a golden handcuff with the key thrown away.” Indeed, San Francisco is a beautiful prison of imagination—a city so unusual it seems unreal. For the inimitable actress and now esteemed painter Sharon Stone, San Francisco was a place to die and be reborn as an artist. In her new exhibition, “My Eternal Failure,” on view at Gallery 181 at San Francisco's 181 Fremont Residences until August 31st, these days of vulnerability are explored in a series of large-scale, abstract paintings that exemplify Stone’s adeptness at shape, color, and composition.  Heartbreak and a 2001 brain injury in San Francisco allowed Stone to see colors in a whole new way—her prismatic kaleidoscopic palette is like a psychotropic wellspring. “I want this exhibition to serve as a vehicle for self-forgiveness, and I hope it can help others do the same by letting go of societal stigmas and imposed perceptions,” says Stone. “In this way, failures become sources of strength, and to face them is to keep growing. The exhibition’s title My Eternal Failure is freeing for me.”

 

Jester, by Sharon Stone, 2023 (acrylic on canvas), 36” x 18”

 

Each Person Is A Portal: Read Our Interview of Seffa Klein on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition @ Galerie Poggi in Paris →

 
 

The human race has been gazing at the stars with a sense of wonderment since time immemorial. These cogitations have inspired the creation of everything from religious mythologies to monumental earthworks to marine navigation, space navigation and innumerable inventions in between. It is a universal human experience where most of us encounter our first existential ponderings and Seffa Klein is no exception. What is exceptional about her experience is that she comes from a family of artists whose careers have been dedicated to exploring universal truths in the realms of art, science, and spirituality, which has afforded her the unique opportunity to engage with these profound questions further in the light of day rather than extinguishing them. While most of us are told to invest our time and energy in more realistic endeavors, the Klein family is deeply rooted in the belief that this is as real as it gets. Gallerist Jérôme Poggi recognized this unique quality of the Klein family as one of artists who foster each other’s practices rather than competing with one another, which inspired him to curate a solo exhibition of Seffa Klein’s works alongside selected works from Yves Klein, Rotraut, Marie Raymond, and Günther Uecker, who are respectively her grandparents, great-grandparent, and great-uncle. See the exhibition before it closes tomorrow, July 13. Read more.

Celine Haute Parfumerie Introduces Bath & Body Collection

 
 

Hedi Slimane introduces Celine's first bath and body range for the couture house. This new line features a wide array of fragrances from the Celine Haute Parfumerie collection.

The Celine Bath & Body Collection expands to include liquid soap, body lotion, hand cream, and hair mist. Each product is highly perfumed, capturing the signature scents of the Celine Haute Parfumerie collection: Parade, La Peau Nue, Cologne Céleste, Reptile, Black Tie.

Collection arriving soon.

The First UN Conference Dedicated to Ocean Literacy Meets in Venice for World Oceans Day Organized by Prada Group & UNESCO

On June 7th and 8th, for World Oceans Day, the first United Nations conference dedicated to ocean literacy entitled “Ocean Literacy World Conference” took place in Venice. The event, organized by the Prada Group and UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission represents an important milestone in the partnership between the two organizations which, since 2019, have been working side by side to develop the SEA BEYOND educational program aimed at raising awareness among the younger generations on the health and protection of the ocean.

This included the presentation of the first SEA BEYOND Ideas Box, the result of a collaboration with the international NGO Bibliothèques Sans Frontières, which aims to facilitate access to education for children and young citizens in vulnerable communities. Designed by Philippe Starck in 2014, the Ideas Box is a mobile multimedia center of over 100 square meters, equipped with internet connection, tablets, laptops and over 250 books and games, as well as hundreds of training materials. To celebrate the Ideas Box’s tenth anniversary, Philippe Starck and Patrick Weil, Founder and President of Bibliothèques Sans Frontières, told the story of its inception in a dedicated conversation. The contents of the media center were curated by UNESCO's ocean literacy team in collaboration with Bibliothèques Sans Frontières and a selection will also be integrated into those already operating in metropolitan France and overseas regions (8 Ideas Boxes), Burundi (4 Ideas Boxes) and Ivory Coast (6 Ideas Boxes). The teams responsible for managing the individual Ideas Boxes will be trained by UNESCO’s ocean literacy team.

The conference brought together 131 delegates from UNESCO Member States and ocean literacy experts from around the world to contribute to the “Venice Declaration for Ocean Literacy,” a collective document that in ten points contains concrete recommendations to rebalance the relationship between the ocean and human beings. The declaration will be shared with UN Member States on July 2nd in New York to help shape the agenda for the UN Ocean Conference to be held in Nice, June, 2025.

Devon Dejardin's Pareidolia Is A Reflection of Your Inner Psyche @ Carl Kostyál in Stockholm

 
 

Devon Dejardin’s new solo exhibition of paintings and sculptures takes its name from the strange and universal phenomenon wherein we see faces in abstract imagery. In a broader sense, pareidolia is the perception of scrutable objects in any kind of nebulous stimulus. We see animals in cloud formations and hear voices in white noise. From Rorschach’s inkblot tests, to hidden messages in a record played backwards, to Jesus Christ on a piece of toast, there are endless examples of our unconscious tendency to discern meaning and order in the face of chaos. For Dejardin, these works are guardians. They draw together elements of various faiths and belief systems. What you see when you look at any of these pieces may differ depending on your own belief systems, your relationship to art history, the conversation you were just having, and your emotional wellbeing. You might find that when you step away and come back to any given work that you can’t remember if you’ve seen it before or if you’re in fact looking at a new painting. Layer by layer, the works reflect aspects of our inner psyche back at us, like mirrored building blocks that reveal the ever shifting unconscious mind as it wanders around in real time.

Pareidolia is on view through July 21st @ Carl Kostyál Hospitalet, Sjökvarnsbacken 15, 131 71 Nacka, Stockholm

Autre Magazine LEVITY ISSUE Celebration At The Historic Arzner-Morgan Residence in Los Angeles

On Saturday June 8th, Autre Magazine celebrated its Spring/Summer 2024 Levity Issue at the historic Arzner-Morgan Residence in Los Angeles, now the West Coast outpost of Half Gallery, helmed by author and art dealer Bill Powers. With a crystal clear view of Los Angeles, the Greek-Revival home built for one of Hollywood’s first openly queer filmmakers in 1930, welcomed an intimate, personally invited guest list. Cocktails were provided by Legende Rakija in partnership with Casamara Club. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Read A Conversation Between Artists Darius Airo and Jon Pylypchuk on the Occasion of Airo's Solo Exhibition →

 
 

Between the minutia and the mirage of our fragmented contemporary existence, artists Darius Airo and Jon Plypchuk both create work imbued with a humorous and ironic darkness masked by playfulness. An inside joke, a half forgotten dream, a song lyric, abstracted figures caught between the waveforms of television static or the rain-drenched glass of a car windshield—our brains continually try to make sense of the world like an undecoded cypher. In Airo’s recent paintings and pastels, presented in the exhibition Mickey’s Mirror (opening May 25 at Abigail Ogilvy gallery in Los Angeles, curated by Josh White—whitebox.la), making sense of the world requires clever conceptual conceit of internal mirrors and the abstracted visages of iconic cartoon characters. In the following conversation, Airo and Plypchuk discuss how the world around them is absorbed into their work. Read more.

MSCHF Presents Art 2 @ Perrotin in Los Angeles

MSCHF presents Art 2, their latest exhibition and second solo show with Perrotin, which is being featured at their Los Angeles location. A compilation of some of their most prominent works, what stands most strikingly at the center of the gallery is the 2004 PT Cruiser which made its way across the United States. An understandable $19.99 could earn the average citizen rights to the car’s keys, prompting an all-american car chase which found its end in Truckee, California. MSCHF’s notorious, oversized shoes make a recurring appearance throughout the exhibition, which the product’s founders claim to “haunt the gallery.”

An Ikea-esque contraption stands assumingly amidst the chaos–it’s a sink made from standard hardware. One of the sink pieces was installed in the bathroom of the MET in New York City–so, MSCHF now has a permanent installation in one of the most renowned museums in the world. Lining one of the gallery walls are 249 copies of Picasso’s infamous La Poisson, which is a small wooden sculpture of a fish. The original stands among them, but the viewer may never know which one really laid in the hands of the great Spanish painter. Regardless, buyers receive an official bidding certificate which directly replicates the one MSCHF founders received when they successfully bid for the wooden object at a Christie’s auction. There’s no need to sue for copyright infringement. Near the entrance of the gallery is a Botero–once a portrait of a jarringly corpulent businessman has been visibly edited into a skinnier version. MSCHF retitled the work Ozempic (Botched Fumador de Cigarillos). 

Art 2 is on view through June 1 @ Perrotin, 5036 West Pico Boulevard Los Angeles

Bitter & Sweet by Emi Iguchi & Camille Ange Pailler

 

Sia Arnika velvet dress
Untitled Lab x Sia Arnika leather boots
Von Dutch cap
Wolford leopard tights

 

photography by Emi Iguchi
styling by Camille Ange Pailler
hair and makeup by Janette Peters
casting direction by Ananya Nisbet
model Lilja Drab via @elf_mgmt
photo assistance by Heinrich Wrede
styling assistance by Nadine Sham 

Katharina Dubrick knit wool top and mittens
Lina Nix skirt

Sia Arnika jumpsuit
Olivia Ballard bomber jacket
Lina Nix tutu skirt

 
 

Von Dutch cap
Sia Arnika velvet dress

Celine denim hooded jacket and shorts
Our Legacy t-shirt
Sia Arnika x Untitled Lab leather boots
Wolford leopard tights

 

Malene Specht jacket
Celine short

Celine short
Wolford leopard tights

 

Olivia Ballard bomber jacket

Sia Arnika jumpsuit
Olivia Ballard bomber jacket
Lina Nix tutu skirt

 
 

Valentino dress and sandals

Malene Specht jacket
Celine short
Sia Arnika x Untitled Lab leather boots

 
 

Cissel Dubrick shirt
Olivia Ballard shirt

Valentino dress

 
 

Cissel Dubrick shirt
Olivia Ballard shirt

 
 
 

Watch Celine 22 "Symphonie Fantastique" Featuring Their Winter 24 Men's Collection

In 1969, Leonard Bernstein described the "Symphonie Fantastique" as the first psychedelic symphony ever composed, and more than 100 years before the dawn of the movement in the late 1960s.

"...those sounds you're hearing come from the first psychedelic symphony in history, the first musical description ever made of a trip, written one hundred thirty odd years before the Beatles, way back in 1830 by the brilliant french composer Hector Berlioz. He called it "Symphonie Fantastique," or "Fantastic," and fantastic it is, in every sense of the word, including psychedelic."

Hedi Slimane discovered the "Symphonie Fantastique" at the age of 11 and became passionate about the romantic musical piece by the young Berlioz. Hector Berlioz was only 26 years old when he was in an obsessive relationship with English actress Harriet Smithson, which led him to compose the "Symphonie Fantastique" on December 5th 1830 in Paris.

Directed by Hedi Slimane

© hedi slimane photography and film

The "Symphonie fantastique" collection was filmed between January and February in the Mojave desert and Los Angeles.

Makeup artist: Aaron de Mey
Hair stylist: Esther Langham
Hair colorist: Alex Brownsel

SPY Projects Presents Unrequited Group Show: An Eternally Recontextualized Assemblage of Works @ the Former Brooke Alexander Gallery in New York

Pietro Alexander’s SPY Projects, a Los Angeles-based gallery that has developed a reputation for recognizing young, emerging talent both local and international since its inception in 2021 hosts their Unrequited group show at 59 Wooster Street. Not just another SoHo loft, the building—the very floor, in fact, once housed the Brooke Alexander Gallery, which opened its first exhibition in the space nearly forty years ago and worked with a number of artists who have gone on to become legends, influencing the art scene in New York and beyond. It’s a natural meeting place between East and West coasts, and a fitting home for SPY Projects’ New York debut, since the eponymous gallerist Brooke Alexander’s brother was the artist Peter Alexander, a pioneering figure of the Light and Space movement in California.

As much as we should know what an artwork is—what’s placed in front of us, contained within a frame, defined by a title and tombstone—there’s always something that seems to escape, an uncontrollable excess of meaning beyond what anyone, even the artist could predict. Because ultimately, the substance of it all is continually created anew and brought into being through every encounter between the viewer and the work itself. As a result, even the most rigorous or tightly structured artwork remains porous and in flux, incorporating shifting social contexts, feelings, and personal histories.

So, if it can’t be controlled, why fight it? Curator Sara Apple encourages you to let go of the Sisyphean struggle to reconcile vision and meaning with the murky, malleable world. The exhibition is not an endpoint, the final realization of a concept, but an embarkation, an embrace of the unrequited to welcome the larger possibilities of experience. This extends from the artists—selected less because they fit an aesthetic mold or illustrate a particular idea, but out of organic connections—to the structure of the show itself, which hosts events and performances throughout its duration. By opening up the exhibition while supporting its full potential, all these disparate strands can be brought together, encouraged to develop into the unknown and unexpected, and become something more in the process.

Unrequited includes works by Peter Alexander, Malik Al Maliki, Katherine Auchterlonie, Stefan Bondell, Cristine Brache, Sasha Filimonov, Chris Lloyd, Kay Kasparhauser, Alison Peery, Raymond Pettibon, and Montana Simone. The show is on view through May 31 @ 59 Wooster Street, New York

 
 

Andrés Anza Chosen As Winner of the 2024 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize

 
 

Awarded for his work “I only know what I have seen,” 2023. Andrés Anza was chosen from thirty finalists by a distinguished jury composed of leading figures from the worlds of design, architecture, journalism, criticism, and museum curatorship, including Magdalene Odundo, Minsuk Cho, Olivier Gabet and Abraham Thomas.

This year’s edition of the LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft prize presents a selection of works that feature organic and biomorphic forms that push materials to their physical limits. Many of the works repurpose found or recycled materials and there is a focus on the elevation and transformation of the everyday. All thirty of the shortlisted works will be exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris from May 15th through June 9th. The exhibition will also be available to view online and documented through an exhibition catalogue.

Andrés’ life-size ceramic sculpture has an arresting and almost human presence in the exhibition. Its anthropomorphic form – allowing it to seem at once figurative and abstract – is intricately constructed using thousands of individual ceramic protrusions. These tiny spikes make up five puzzle pieces, which have been assembled with an almost architectural intention and precision.

The jury observed that this work defies time and cultural context, drawing upon ancient, archaeological forms but also tracing a post-digital aesthetic that sees ceramics absorbing the most defining influences of our time.

Tits Up: Read An Interview of Author Sarah Thornton On Her Latest Release →

Annie Sprinkle "Bosom Ballet" 1990-91, courtesy the artist

From the auction house to the titty bar, the art fair to the witches’ retreat, Sarah Thornton has moved her ethnographic eye from the art world to the titty world—and we are all better for it. Tits Up: What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, and Witches Tell Us about Breasts explores what breasts mean to five different breast-experts. The result is an ambitious collage of uplifting sagas (also the original name for Thornton’s book before the publisher asked her to change it). Thornton and I met over Zoom to talk about some of these lived experiences, particularly her own—everything from what inspired her to write the book in the first place to how writing it changed her relationship to her own body. Read more.

Read an Interview of Cammie Staros on the Occasion of Her Exhibition @ SCAD Museum of Art →

Image courtesy of the artist and SCAD.

Cammie Staros’ Sunken City featured at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art through June 24 reinvents our relationships to the traditional historical narrative. Referencing antiquities against the expansiveness of time, Staros positions iconic relics as vessels with which to unite history and the present moment. Her aquarium virtines, which house seemingly anthropomorphic vases, are manifested as self-sustaining biomes aptly referencing the nuances of the lifetime. Staros’ exhibition uniquely encapsulates the passage of time, while simultaneously illuminating the role of the object in the context of human systems. Her modernization, yet simultaneous preservation, of the iconic relic speaks to the primal instinctual basis of a commodity-driven culture and the modern conceptualization of value. Read more.

Sunken City is organized by SCAD Museum of Art curator Ben Tollefson and presented as part of SCAD deFINE ART 2024.

Human Intuition and Artificial Intelligence Collide in Sparks @ Future Gallery in Berlin

Sparks, a group exhibition featuring works by Rush Baker IV, Kévin Bray, Amalie Jakobsen, Chanel Khoury, Anselm Reyle, Vickie Vainionpää, and Jack Warne, delves into emergent artistic processes, from Augmented Reality to collaborative AI and simulated asteroid mining. It offers insights into the diverse and imaginative techniques these artists employ, such as Bray’s collaboration with AI to meld countless versions of his original hand-drawn sketches processed by a generative engine, and Vainionpää’s use of code in her oil paintings as a medium to create infinite relationships between diameter, curve, and entanglement. Reyle’s works are characterized by the use of various found objects that have been removed from their original function, altered visually, and recontextualized. Remnants of consumer society, discarded materials, symbols of urbanity, and industrial change play a central role in his oeuvre.

Sparks is on view through June 1st at Future Gallery, Schöneberger Ufer 59, 10785 Berlin.

John Valadez Extends the Chicano Arts Movement in Chaos Anime @ Luis de Jesus Los Angeles

ocean scene John Valadez chaos beach

John Valadez, Chaos, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

A trailblazer of the early Chicano Arts Movement in the 1970s and 80s, John Valadez’s work has come to define an iconography of Chicano experience in the city by catalyzing its changing dynamics and reconstructing a mythical allegory that speaks to an alternate vision. Through a multidisciplinary practice spanning 45 years, and encompassing documentary photography and portraiture, public murals, paintings, and pastel works, Valadez has cultivated a style that transcends genre designations. Never settling into one box, his work evokes a fluidity between multiple cultures and visual lexicons, effectively mirroring the unsettled experience of the Chicano identity. Valadez continues to pursue politically engaged work—a persistent voice championing generations of Chicano and Latinx communities.

John Valadez: Chaos Anime presents new paintings that address the shifting global dynamics and social climates facing new generations of Chicanos today, alongside recent works that revisit earlier themes. Together, the works exhibit the breadth of the artist’s social commentaries and further contextualize his lauded approach to painting. Drawing from current events, cultural histories, city life, and such experiences filtered through lucid dreaming, Valadez implements realism, mannerism, abstraction, and montage as a vehicle for allegory and satire to ignite a myriad of socio-political conversations. Themes of invisible borders, sublime skies, tempestuous seas, and juxtapositions between reality, dreams, and the natural world versus the consequences of human interferences, are but some of the constants throughout the trove of Valadez’s urban proverbs. A pivotal moment in Valadez’s new body of work is his extension of Chicano Movement principles, speaking to global matters of displacement, gentrification, economic disparities, famine, the environment, and geopolitics.

Chaos Anime is on view through June 8 @ Luis de Jesus Los Angeles, 1110 Mateo Street, Los Angeles, CA 90021

 
women at the beach John Valadez

John Valadez, Piernas Anime, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

 

Two Men Sitting: Read Our Interview of Photographer & Curator Job Piston →

Two Men Sitting, Delfi, 30 x 40 in, lustre print, 2024. 1 AP, Ed. of 3 (option 17 x 22 in, metallic lustre print)

Muna Malik and Job Piston arrive on a Greek island sprinkled with sunflowers, daisies, and the sight of a tossed olive oil can. The two artists are gazing upon the Aegean Sea stretching out in front of them. They are in Hydra on a bench in the shadow of the Deste Project Space, not far from where they met for the first time to participate in the art and curatorial residency with ARC Athens. An oversized wind spinner with the melancholic face of the Greek god Apollo by Jeff Koons peers down over them. Apollo is often associated with sun and light, representing the illuminations of truth and knowledge. It is a fitting setting for a conversation around photography and metamorphosis, as they discuss the artist and curator Job Piston’s latest Los Angeles solo project Estate Sale. Read more.