Prince rocked the catwalk at the London Fashion Week

My rock-soul-funky-pop god Prince had fashionistas dancing in the aisles at London Fashion Week on Wednesday when he staged a surprise performance at Matthew Williamson's catwalk show.
The singer, who is playing a series of concerts in London, at first appeared to be only a front row guest at Williamson's spring-summer 2008 collection.

But the usual fashion scene became a pop concert when a Prince track struck up and the first two models onto the catwalk - purple dresses - started to dance.

Prince, wearing a black suit and hat, then began singing into a microphone from his seat before jumping up and performing on the runway flanked by his band.
By that time, many in the audience, who included actress Trudie Styler, the wife of musician Sting, were on their feet clapping and snapping photos with their mobile phones.
"He really wanted to do this, and you don't say 'No' to Prince," Williamson told Reuters TV after the show, his first in London since he left for New York five years ago.
After the impromptu gig, Williamson, who is in London celebrating his 10 years as a designer, sent models down the catwalk in richly embroidered skirts and dresses glittering with seed pearls.

Striped jackets - a theme throughout London Fashion Week - were offset with splashes of turquoise, pink and orange.
The show closed to the strains of Prince's "Kiss" from his best-selling 1986 album "Parade".

While Williamson plans three boutique openings -- in New York, Los Angeles and Paris -- in the next two years thanks to an injection of private equity cash, Aquascutum Chief Executive Kim Winser said her aim was to extend in the United States and into accessories. But she was already seeing a surge in sales across its 200 store network thanks to a year-long revamp.
"The figures in the stores -- which is the most exciting thing -- are double what they were last year, and for women's wear they are three times higher," Winser told Reuters.

Louise Bourgeois' spiders from Mars

Louise Bourgeois has two shows in London, and even if she is at the age of 95, she remains one of the most prolific artist.


Her eerie 35-foot-high black spider entitled Maman, was the first artwork commissioned for the Unilever series for the opening of Tate Modern in London 2000. This month, she will have two shows : her first major retrospective in the UK at Tate Modern in London from 10 October to 20 January 2008 and, concurrently, an exhibition of new works at Hauser & Wirth Colnaghi.

Louise Bourgeois uses various materials for her works such as latex, marble, tapestry, and old underwear. Her sculptures are always autobiographical, often recalling her traumatic childhood in France.
These shows will offer a rare opportunity to immerse in her unique and rewarding world. Whether viewing her earliest pieces placed alongside her 1990s works that include Cells at the Tate or her most recent bronze sculptures at Hauser & Wirth, Louise Bourgeois provides a fascinating universe.

Frances Morris, curator of the Tate show, puts it : "She is a very frail, tiny, old lady - it is remarkable even that she is still making work today, let alone continuing to reinvent herself."

Louise Bourgeois - Arch of Hysteria, 1993.

Courtesy Cheim & Read, Galerie Karsten Greve, and Hauser & Wirth

© Louise Bourgeois.

Photo: Allan Finkelman

To learn more :
www.hauserwirth.com/

www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/louisebourgeois/default.shtm

R.I.P Gianfranco Ferré

15 August 1944 - 17 June 2007

I just wanted to pay tribute to renowed Italian designer Gianfranco Ferré, who passed away in June. He will always be remembered as the "Frank Lloyd Wright of Italian fashion" since he originally studied architecture. This epithet can also be applied to his unique take on fashion.

Harmony, geometry, finesse, free-flowing silhouettes, volume and fullness, classic yet modern, are some of the expressions used to describe the creations of Gianfranco Ferré.

http://www.gianfrancoferre.com/

DRAWING RESTRAINT by Matthew Barney

At Serpentine Gallery
20 September – 11 November 2007

Matthew Barney - DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 2005Production still Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York© 2005 Matthew BarneyPhotograph: Chris Winget

Matthew Barney (born 1967, San Francisco) is one of the most celebrated artists of his generation. His practice encompasses a diverse array of media including drawing, sculpture, photography, performance, film and installation, which are presented in exhibitions that are conceived by the artist as a gesamtkunstwerk or total work.


Barney’s exhibition at the Serpentine presents works from his Drawing Restraint series, which he began in 1987 while still in art school. Inspired by the idea of resistance training, he applied restraints to his body while drawing, exhibiting the resulting drawings, props and video documentation of the performances in the spaces where the actions had taken place. The Drawing Restraint series investigates the relationship between resistance and creativity and artistic and athletic bodies working at the threshold of physical limitations.


More recent works in the series continue to explore ways in which the body can be transformed, incorporating scripted narratives and diverse references ranging from Greek mythology to Japanese tea ceremonies. The exhibition at the Serpentine explores, in some depth, the sculptural cycle related to Barney’s recent feature film DRAWING RESTRAINT 9, 2006, which is being screened at the Gate Picturehouse cinema during the course of the exhibition. The Serpentine has worked closely with the artist to realise this ambitious presentation of work featuring sculpture, drawings, film, photography and video. Barney has also made a new work, Drawing Restraint 16, for the Serpentine; drawings and other residue of this performance fill the Gallery’s large central space.


The Serpentine Gallery exhibition will be accompanied by Drawing Restraint Volume V. The publication will include new texts on Barney’s Drawing Restraint series by New York-based writer and curator Neville Wakefield, Serpentine Gallery Chief Curator Kitty Scott and a short story by the award-winning Icelandic poet and lyricist Sjón. The book will also include previously unpublished images of Barney’s recent artworks.


Barney was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize in 1996 and has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in the USA and internationally. The complete Cremaster cycle was the subject of a major exhibition organised by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2002 that travelled to Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris.
More recently, the Drawing Restraint series has been presented in different incarnations at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, both in 2005; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2006.


To learn more : http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2007/04/matthew_barney20_september11_n.html

Bill Viola is so enigmatic...and fascinates me so much...

'The two main examples of multiple screens', Bill Viola explained earlier this year in an interview witht the Los Angeles Times, 'are in a video making and in late Medieval-Renaissance altarpieces'. This month, to coincide with the Biennale, Viola combines these two examples in an ambitious installation to be shown inside the church of San Gallo in Venice.


Ocean Without a Shore (2007) is a triptych composed of plasma screens postioned around the three existing stone altars of the fifteenth-century church, once a private chapel for one of the watery city's elite families. Viola (no stranger to mysticism) has said of the piece that 'it is about the presence of the dead in our lives'. The three stone altars in San Gallo become transparent surfaces for the manifestation of images of the dead attempting to re-enter our world'.


Viola's work is underscored by a spiritualism that has, in the past, riled a number of critics. But while the triptych is rich in religious iconography - there is something undeniably baptismal about the water dousing his ethereal figures - it is really a showcase for what Viola does best: visualise liminality with a poetry that is hard to resist. Slowed-down footage captures the borderline status of his subjects, whose bodies are poised at a threshold of being and non-being. As in previous works, gushing water is used to delineate flux; the artist's interest in water as a medium through which one passes from one world to the next is founded in a childhood experience in which he nearly drowned.
Ocean Without a Shore isn't the artist's only work to be displayed in a place of worship; next year Viola unveil a specially commissioned work for St Paul's Cathedral in London. And despite his occasionally straying into non denominational self-help aphorising, not many artists can count the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Dalai Lama as admirers.

Ocean Without a Shore can be seen from 10 June to 24 November, Chiesa San Gallo, Venice.

From ArtReview June 2007

The band that I worship TOOL should get in touch with Bill Viola...


More info on:
http://www.billviola.com/


http://www.oceanwithoutashore.com/

Trienale de Arquitectura de Lisboa

Chegou ao fim a Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa.

Ao longo de dois meses intensos a Trienal de Arquitectura juntou largas dezenas de colaboradores, conferencistas nacionais e internacionais, entidades públicas e privadas, universidades portuguesas e estrangeiras, arquitectos, urbanistas, artistas, músicos, historiadores e especialistas de áreas profissionais muito diversas. Esta primeira edição lançou as bases para a constituição de um “Festival” de arquitectura capaz de motivar o interesse e a participação, tanto da comunidade local como do público internacional. Portugal contribui desta forma para a reflexão, o debate, prospecção e divulgação da arquitectura nas suas múltiplas formas de expressão, das contingências regionais à complexa realidade global.

Falar de Vazios Urbanos, tema central do evento, foi também pretexto para falar da cidade contemporânea e, paralelamente, da situação específica de Lisboa no contexto internacional. Os vazios, espaços de falha funcional e humana, são lugares reveladores dos imprevistos da cidade – uma outra cidade não planeada que agora descobrimos presente em todas as metrópoles europeias. O crescimento rápido ditou a falência dos modelos modernos de urbanismo, pois que não existe já um paradigma único capaz de anular os seus crescentes graus de incerteza. Questionar, reflectir sobre este novo território da urbanidade é algo para que também a arquitectura é assim chamada a participar.

Reflectiram-se, nesta edição, sobre os muitos modos como a mudança actual é, inicialmente, uma mudança de sociedade e só depois de cidade. O aumento da velocidade diminuiu o tempo mas aumentou as distâncias. A expansão tornou-se possível e com ela surgiram novas centralidades – “nós” que com o tempo se tornaram outros pólos de crescimento autónomo e multi-funcionalidade interna. Estas transformações têm motivado uma reflexão crítica em todo o mundo, pois que se exigem hoje soluções de governabilidade territorial que sejam capazes de antecipar a incerteza presente no fenómeno urbano. Também à arquitectura cumpre contribuir activamente para uma paisagem urbana melhor e mais humana, respeitando os seus vários conteúdos – entre os quais a dimensão ecológica que esta implica – e dando sentido aos seus vazios. O desafio é imenso e a todos diz respeito.

A Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa regressa em 2010.

More info on:
http://trienaldelisboa.sapo.pt/

New campaign for Louis Vuitton...hard to understand the marketing strategy

Following J-Lo, Scarlett Johansson, and friend Pharell Williams, Catherine Deneuve was photographed by Annie Leibovitz for the new LV campaign. Deneuve, 63 posed at Gare de l'Est in Paris sitting on 2 Vuitton trunks with Manahattan handbags dangling from her arm.

"Our priority over recent years has been to establish Louis Vuitton among the world's leading fashion houses" said Yves Carcelle. "Under the direction of Marc Jacobs, this goal has been brilliantly achieved. But the purpose of this campaign is to restate our 150-year heritage as pioneert of the art of travel. We are very proud of this new campaign, and delighted to be associated with such exceptionnal yet very different personalities." Among those personalities, Steffi Graf and Andre Agassi, as well as Michael Gorbatchev.

To learn more: www.louisvuitton.com