Magazine: Mono.Kultur #31. Michaël Borremans: Shades of Doubt.

Michaël Borremans, Shades of Doubt, It is not something of beauty underneath, 2012

When Belgian artist Michaël Borremans first presented his paintings to the world at the tender age of 37, he immediately caused a stir in the art scene. His realistic yet mysterious figurative images subtly draw one to the centre of a question which remains permanently unspoken. Through the combination of his immaculate painting techniques, using muted tones and classic compositions, and the puzzling scenarios that are at the heart of his work, the artist brings together both:
melancholy and humour.

Signed by the prestigious David Zwirner gallery in New York, Borremans represents the modern reincarnation of the classic painter, in the same league as his colleague and friend Neo Rauch. Recently, Borremans also started translating his mysterious scenarios into abstract short films, which have been shown at Berlin Biennial 2006, among others. He lives and works in Ghent.

With mono.kultur, Michaël Borremans talked about the mystery at the heart of painting and life in general, his commission for the Belgian Queen, and why he needs to wear his Sunday suit when he goes to work.

The issue features a whopping 20 plates of Michaël Borremans’ paintings, all printed in lifesize scale, allowing you to examine the technical mastery behind his work in breathtaking detail.

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T293 Gallery, Naples and Rome

6 April 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Culture Galleries No Comments

Established in 2002 in an historical building of the Neapolitan centre, in Via dei Tribunali 293, T293 has always been characterised by a keen awareness on artistic practices that are both experimental and conceptually relevant to the current discourse in the field. First conceived as artists’ space dedicated to the support of emerging artists, in 2006 T293 changes its organizational status and starts operating as a company managed by the founder Paola Guadagnino and the independent curator Marco Altavilla, who joined as co-Director.

With the new organization, new purposes have been added, expanding the gallery’s mission towards a more international approach and a more incisive curatorial attitude. With the firm intention to honour its roots while also mainting an international status, in 2010 T293 chooses to be headquartered in Rome and to become a benchmark in the contemporary art sector, both nationally and internationally. First located near to Piazza Navona, it then moves to via Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni, few minutes walking from the Colosseum, where is still located.

Addressing an audience that is simultaneously cosmopolitan and qualified, T293 cultivates a professional network characterised by the high professionality of its members. In order to achieve its primary goals, since the very beginning of its activity T293 has presented groundbreaking projects at international art fairs such as Frieze London, Frieze New York, MiArt in Milan, Art Basel Miami Beach and Art Basel-Art Statements, where in 2008 has been awarded the prestigious Bâloise Art Prize (with a solo show of Tris Vonna-Michell).

Its eagerness in finding what is new in the contemporary artistic scenario has allowed T293 to be the place where today’s most interesting artists have had their first solo shows. The artists T293 represents always achieve international recognition as testified by their activities in institutions such as Tate, Palais de Tokyo, Museum Fridericianum and La Biennale di Venezia among the others. More recently, T293 has inaugurated new, successful models of collaboration with other professionals, hosting within its walls a programme of artistic residencies as well as innovative curatorial projects conceived together with other galleries and institutions.

Willing to nurture the development of contemporary art and visual culture through different generations of artists, T293 showcases that which is the excellence in the contemporary art field not only through its far-reaching exhibitions programme, but also with the support of projects and publications that act as catalysts for the development of fresh ways of seeing and contextualizing contemporary art.

http://www.t293.it/gallery/

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Valentino, Menswear, Fall 2012

1 February 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Fashion Main No Comments

Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli for Valentino, Menswear, Fall 2012

Once upon a time, women had a dressmaker; men had a tailor. The law of supply and demand elevated those services into haute couture and bespoke, which have, ever since, been the summit of human achievement when it comes to cut and cloth. But they’ve also remained a Venus and Mars-style proposition, which gave Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli’s proposals for the latest collection of Valentino’s menswear a twinge of subtle subversion. Inject the spirit of couture into the traditions of menswear?

Well, Chiuri and Piccioli felt it was worth a try. They were, after all, the special invitees of the 81st edition of Pitti Uomo in Florence, and that honor usually inspires designers to stretch their creativity. In their case, there was an added impetus. Valentino staged his first fashion show in Florence 50 years ago, and the designers who carry on his name wanted to give their menswear a sense of his legacy. “Memory is very important to innovate,” said Piccioli. “We wanted the same language in a different moment: the sharpness of shape, the belief in workmanship. We wanted to sculpt lightness.”

Their mood board told the tale. Monochrome images of Mastroianni and Delon in the early sixties, at the pinnacle of their male gorgeousness, were echoed on the catwalk in leanly tailored jackets and narrow trousers cropped over sockless shoes. The sharpness of white shirts and skinny black ties amplified the sixties feel, but at the same time, they had the new-wave flavor that niggles at the edge of so much that Chiuri and Piccioli do. Not darkness or danger, insisted Chiuri. “It’s something private. This is not a show-off collection. You need to look inside.” That in itself is a criterion of traditional couture—that a garment could be so perfectly crafted that it would look just as good when it was turned inside out. And here that challenge was met with thermal sealing—or bonding—rather than seaming. Not only was the result surprisingly light, but the internal structure of jackets bonded with traditional horsehair linings was a joy to behold. Same with a black leather jacket bonded with cashmere or a peacoat bonded with shearling. The notion of life on the inside peaked with a green leather jacket that had a perfect little coin purse zipped into its interior. So perfect, in fact, that there was something obsessive bordering on fetishistic about the detail.

Piccioli did indeed acknowledge that “obsessive perfection” is a spur for him and his design partner. At the same time, they insist they understand how a confident mix of sportswear casual and tailored formal is the essence of modern menswear. Here, their version of the mix was evident in the way a coat was thrown capelike over a suit (it was “sportiest” in a glazed denim). The look had an almost sinister precision that felt like the very opposite of casual. On the contrary, the fact that Chiuri and Piccioli have faith that there is a young man who will follow them where they want to lead is reassuring in the current climate.

http://www.style.com/fashion-shows/fall-2012-menswear/valentino

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Christopher Kane Fall 2016, Ready To Wear, London

30 July 2016

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Fashion No Comments

Christopher Kane, Ready To Wear, Fall 2016, London

“Our mum used to embarrass us when she picked us up from school wearing one of those plastic rain hats,” said Tammy Kane, Christopher Kane’s sister. The very private world of the Kanes and their memories of growing up outside Glasgow in the ’90s will always inform Christopher Kane’s work. The Kanes suffered the loss of their mother a year ago, so the salute to Christine Kane was there at the beginning of the show, transformed into tied-under-the-chin plastic rain hats—the work of Stephen Jones. But searching for a linear trail of clues to make sense of how Kane processes ideas into clothes is never all that helpful. Briefing a crowd of journalists after the show, the designer spoke about reclusive hoarders, an outsider point of view, somebody living behind her own psychological bars. “She doesn’t know how to get out. She’s stuck.” Kane finds beauty in that manic predicament. “Things are so normal these days,” he shrugged. “So why not think out of the box?”

Really, the thing to watch a Kane show for are the creative fusion points where he produces something we’ve never quite seen before, trophies of fashion that you know on sight you’d urgently like to make your own. To this pair of eyes, that electricity hit halfway through this collection. The section of asymmetrical black tailoring, jackets, and scarves fringed with ostrich feathers in red, green, and faded pink had an off-hand elegance that would cause a mayhem of envy walking into any room. There would be no regrets spending the money on one of these: They had the quality of long-term classics a woman could—yes—hoard in her wardrobe to bring out again and again.

What else? Nearly ten years on from his neon body-con debut collection, which consisted of one tight (in both senses) statement, Kane is backed by Kering and has many commercial categories on the go and to show. The tubular Swarovski sparkle-mesh “bolster” necklaces the Kane siblings made for that original 2006 show continued as lanyards dangling sunglasses, or were whipped into whorls as big glamorous brooches around faceted stones. Crystal-dangling alphabet charms were pinned along necklines and scattered across skirts. A part of the show that involved haberdashery ribbons and scraps of fabric samples was also available in the form of one of Christopher Kane’s zip-top envelope clutches. All these came under the heading of little accessible things young girls can afford to show off with. A new gothic-type “K” logo on a beige sweater also seemed aimed at keeping a young audience engaged, which Kane needs to do to keep his brand hot.

Treading that line between reasonably affordable novelty and luxury is a really tough balancing act now—and obviously, that doesn’t just apply to Christopher Kane. On the elevated side, he can do a gray mink coat now, and the complex party dresses he’s made a name with are just as weirdly sexy—like the ones made from alternating stripes of tan pleather and sheer black lace that started the show. But the pressure to encompass it all, all the time, is a strain for every designer when the whole fashion environment is in upheaval. The underlying narrative of a woman in a disturbed mental state that came through Kane’s show today is easy enough to link with so many of this season’s other creative excursions into surrealism. It’s a mad world out there.

Source: Style.com.
Text: Sarah Mower, Style.com.
All images belongs to the respective artist and management.

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Liliane Lijn

4 October 2011

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Artists Main No Comments

Liliane Lijn, In The Valley of Darkness, 1973

Partly, perhaps as an act of mourning; more obviously as a reparative act, Lijn conceived of her manipulation of prisms as giving them a kind of restorative posthumous existence to remedy their mutilated identity: “A prism on its own is lost. It has no feet, no legs to stand on”. Her fantasy ran that they had lost their function in a world of technical forms by no longer being “anchored into a machine, which one way or another will be a machine for seeing… I must give it a body”.

Liliane Lijn (born 1939), is an American-born artist who was the first woman artist to work with kinetic text (Poem Machines), exploring both light and text as early as 1962. She has lived in London since 1966.

Utilising highly original combinations of industrial materials and artistic processes, Lijn is recognised for pioneering the interaction of art, science, technology, eastern philosophy and female mythology. Lijn is particularly known for her timeless, cone-shaped Koan series. In conversation with Fluxus artist and writer, Charles Dreyfus, Lijn stated that she primarily chose to ‘see the world in terms of light and energy’. Lijn describes her work as ‘A constant dialogue between opposites, my sculptures use light and motion to transform themselves from solid to void, opaque to transparent, formal to organic.’

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Photograpy: Lauren Greenfield

6 April 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Artists Culture Main Photography No Comments

Lauren Greenfield, Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood, 1997, Girl Culture, 2002 and Thin, 2006

Acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield is considered a preeminent chronicler of youth culture, gender, fashion, media, wealth, beauty, and consumer culture as a result of her groundbreaking photographic projects (Girl Culture, Fast Forward, and THIN) and her documentary films (THIN, kids + money, Beauty CULTure, and The Queen of Versailles).

Her photographs have been widely published and exhibited, and are in many museum collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the J. Paul Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the International Center of Photography, the Center for Creative Photography, the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), the Harvard University Archive, the Smith College Museum of Art, the Clinton Library, and the French Ministry of Culture.

In 2012, she received one of the highest honors in documentary film, the Sundance Film Festival Directing Award, US Documentary 2012 for her documentary film, “The Queen of Versailles”. In 2003, American PHOTO Magazine named her one of the “The 25 Most Important Photographers Now.” In 2005, she shared the number three spot of the “100 Most Important People in Photography” (American Photo Magazine). She is the recipient of numerous photography awards and grants, including the ICP Infinity Award for Young Photographer (1996), the Art Directors Club Gold Cube for Photography (2011), a National Geographic Grant, a Hasselblad Foundation Grant, the People’s Choice Award at the Moscow Biennial, and the NPPA Community Awareness Award.

In 2009, Greenfield was one of eight photographers featured in the inaugural exhibit (L8S ANG3L3S) at The Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles. In 2010, Greenfield’s work was also featured in a major historical exhibition at the Getty Museum entitled Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography since the Sixties (2010). Her THIN and Girl Culture traveling exhibitions, curated by Trudy Wilner Stack, have been seen by half a million people in over thirty venues around the world.

Greenfield’s first feature-length documentary film, THIN, aired on HBO, and is accompanied by a photography book of the same name (Chronicle Books, 2006). In this unflinching and incisive study, Greenfield embarks on an emotional journey through the Renfrew Center in Coconut Creek, Florida, a residential facility dedicated to the treatment of eating disorders. The feature-length documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006 and was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Direction in 2007. It won the Grierson Award for best documentary at the London Film Festival, and Grand Jury Prizes at the Independent Film Festival of Boston, the Newport International Film Festival, and the Jackson Hole Film Festival. The project was featured on The Today Show, Good Morning America, Nightline, and CNN and was excerpted in People Magazine. Greenfield’s followed-up documentary short film, entitled kids + money, was selected for the Sundance Film Festival 2008, won the Audience Award at the AFI Film Festival, the Hugo Gold Plaque at the Chicago International Television Awards, the Michael Moore Award for Best Documentary, the Cinema Eye Honor for Nonfiction Filmmaking, and broadcast on HBO in 2008. The film is a conversation with young people from diverse Los Angeles communities about the role of money in their lives. Her third documentary short, Beauty CULTure, was commissioned by The Annenberg Space for Photography in 2011, and became the central installation for a record-setting exhibition in Los Angeles (also entitled Beauty CULTure). Shot in Paris, New York and Los Angeles, this film is a critical examination of “…beauty in popular culture, the narrowing definition of beauty in contemporary society, and the influence of media messages on the female body image”. The short was selected to premiere in the Tribeca Film Festival’s Shorts Program in 2012.

In January 2012, Lauren Greenfield received the Sundance Film Festival’s Directing Award, US Documentary 2012 for her documentary feature film, The Queen of Versailles, which was released theatrically in 2012 (Magnolia Pictures), and will broadcast on Bravo in 2013. The film went on to become on of the top-grossing documentary films in 2012, received numerous awards, nominations, and “Best of 2012” accolades, including the Grand Jury Prize from the Brisbane International Film Festival (BIFFDOCS), a Best Director Award from the RiverRun Film Festival, a Special Jury Documentary Feature prize from the deadCenter Film Festival, and a prestigious nomination for Best Documentary Film, 2012 by the International Documentary Association (IDA). In 2013, Greenfield was one on only five directors nominated by the Directors Guild of America (DGA) for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentaries for the year 2012. According to PBS/POV, The Queen of Versailles was ranked #2 of the Top 10 Documentaries of 2012, based on awards, nominations, peer recommendations, and other ranking criteria.

Greenfield graduated from Harvard in 1987 and started her career as an intern for the National Geographic Magazine. She lectures on her photography, youth culture, popular culture, and body image at museums and universities around the world.

http://www.laurengreenfield.com

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