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Black Chapel, Theaster Gates’ 2022 Serpentine Pavilion is Now Open

The 21st Serpentine Pavilion, Black Chapel, designed by Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates opens today, on June 10, 2022.

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An Anthology of American Workwear – Part 2 — AVANT

This fourth issue is once again dedicated to American Workwear and is a sequel of the first issue, which was published in February 2019. In it, we tell the story of Chinese immigrants during the Gold Rush, the discovery of rare Levi’s pants from 1880 in a California mine, and…

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After Crypto

The hyper-financialized world of crypto and Web3 is just one application of the blockchain. It’s time we explore the wider possibilities that can emerge from shared public ledgers.

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ISSUE №1 – Atelier Munro

The first issue of The AM Times. Not so much a milestone, but rather a stepping stone. A stepping stone to explore our love for character. Born out of a need to tell more stories, share deep dives, and explore the boundaries of what we’re doing at Atelier Munro. Capturing…

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Alstermo Bruk for Atelier Munro for Nyck de Vries – Atelier Munro

A limited-edition suitcase in collaboration with Alstermo Bruk.

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Capsule Magazine

In June 2022, KALEIDOSCOPE launches Capsule, a sibling publication delving into the world of design in its broader definition——one that encompasses interiors and architecture, fashion and technology, ecology and beauty, to explore our relationship with desire and consumption. A hybrid between a maga……

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Omar Ghandi designs a “light-filled wood cathedral” for Toronto restaurant

Canadian studio Omar Gandhi Architect has created a vaulted-wood interior inside a non-descript brick building for chef Matty Matheson’s restaurant in Toronto.

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Why we write

<p>A letter to George Orwell. « All narrative is hypnotic. Some narratives are more hypnotic than others. Because of you, we can be conscious of the kinds and the workings of the narratives that set out to deaden us, lessen us, make us lie, make us part of the lie. »</p>…

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What Mickey Drexler did next

At Gap and J Crew, he helped build some of the US’s biggest brands. Now Drexler and his son are reshaping modern style with Alex Mill…

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MWH Collection

Marius W Hansen, still life photographer focusing on beauty, fragrance, jewellery and accessories. Clients include Burberry, Chanel and Estée Lauder.

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WePresent | Is pop culture dead?

Is pop culture dead? Trey Taylor investigates the rise of fake trends, the fall of the tastemaker, and the rule of the algorithm.

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Slow

Sammy Baloji

From the moment we encountered the super inspirational work of  Congolese photographic artist Sammy Baloji, we haven't been able to get his haunting imagery out of our heads ever since. In the last decade, the artist, who resides in his city of birth Lubumbashi and Brussels, has gathered international acclaim with his photographic works that explore the cultural, architectural and industrial heritage of the region where he was born named Katanga in the African country Congo. Baloji juxtaposes photographic realities, combining past and present, the real and the ideal, to illicit extraordinary cultural and historical tensions.
With his imagery Baloji explores architecture and the human body as traces of social history, sites of memory, and witnesses to operations of power. History of art and documentary photography blend with that of colonialism. His series of photomontages, of revisited albums confront his historical research with the human and economic actuality (such as the new invasions of these territories by companies from China for instance). All of his juxtapositions are highly charged with meaning, but above all: always succeed in leaving an everlasting impression, that forces one to question past, present and future of Congo and the whole continent of Africa.  [ Continue reading ]

Quiet Earth

A little over a year ago, the New York City-based Asya Geisberg Gallery opened a new exhibition named 'Quiet Earth' featuring new works by American collage artist Matthew Craven. Unfortunately we missed the inspirational display at the time, but recently our friend Merijn at …,staat pointed it out to us and we have been infatuated by the haunting works from that moment. The exhibition featured a series of works on paper, combined together rhythmically repeating a flattening of time and scale. In the imagery, Craven combines found images of antiquity with abstract hand-drawn patterns of ambiguous origin, and often subsequently painting walls to emphasize aesthetic choices that personalize his project. Ever-curious and controlled in his choice of placement and mark, as per usual the artist created enigmatic combinations, that despite (or maybe because) their encyclopedic nature, always succeed to engage our gaze and force curiosity about each specific reference and composition.

Craven always begins his imagery on an aged background, often vintage movie posters with yellowing tape, finding images in old books that are never glossy. As his collages compress millennia by placing the prehistoric next to the modern, they shift around time: the distance between the image’s creation and our grasp of its significance, the hours searching for appropriate materials, the cultivation of isolated fragments before evolving into Craven’s artistic universe. Several of the works use the landscape, colorful and present, to form a dialogue with the silent man-made artworks, adding an exciting visual layer. It seems as Craven is saying that we exist today because of our pre-historic past, and all cultures share the same planet. From a greater distance, the differences melt away (which too many people seem to forget now a days!), and just as all landscapes share underlying structure and forms (hence the quietness of the earth, possibly), so too do Craven’s stone temples, monuments, and patterns. The result is a highly fascinating series of work forming a quest through human history without ever losing our interest on an aesthetic level. We can't wait for more aesthetic journeys from the mind of Matthew Craven. [ Continue reading ]

Mirage

At the end of last month, American artist and filmmaker Doug Aitken presented his latest incredible creation to the public, which at this moment is our favorite work he has created thus far. Part of the unique Desert X exhibition, that features a curated selection of site-specific works in the Coachella Valley in the Southern California desert, his creation named 'Mirage' is a installation utilizing the form of a ranch style suburban American house composed of reflective mirrored surfaces. It distills the recognizable and repetitious suburban home into the essence of its lines, reflecting, and disappearing into the vast western landscape. As movement was the driving force behind the settling of the American West, and the long flat vistas that stretched toward the Pacific shaped the ideology behind this iconic embodiment of American architecture, Aitken found inspiration in the history of the site to create his vision on reflection. The specific California Ranch Style, which is unique to the West, was informed by the ideas of legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who believed that architecture should be both in and of the landscape.

In the 1920s and ‘30s a small inspired group of architects working in California and the West created the first suburban ranch style houses, fusing Wright’s fluid treatment of spaces with the simple one-story homes built by ranchers. After World War II, the ranch style’s streamlined simplicity gained popularity and commercial builders employed a simplified assembly line approach to create this efficient form, matching the rapid growth of the suburbs. The mass-produced ranch home became a familiar sight across the country, the style filling the American landscape as quickly as each new subdivision was built and was reinvented for the 21st century by Aitken as the ultimate tool for reflection on the rich past of this area. For those visiting Southern California before the 31st of October make sure not to miss this unique work in the middle of the desert, offering a unique perspective in a place where you are doomed to meet yourself anyway. [ Continue reading ]

Davide Marello

The heartbeat of luxury

The heartbeat of luxury
We meet Italian fashion designer Davide Marello at an interesting time in his life. Only a few weeks before the sunny Saturday afternoon in the last weekend of February, when we meet in Bar Luce at the Foundation Prada Foundation, he has left his position as the very first creative director of Boglioli: the 100-year-old tailoring company that reinvented itself at the beginning of this century through a distinct broken-in and garment-dyed aesthetic. Marello’s departure took place silently, gathering even less attention than his surprising and therewith underexposed appointment two years earlier. Nevertheless, for those who were paying attention: the recent ‘intimate’ presentation of the Autumn/Winter 2017 collection, instead of the usual runway show, could be clearly read as a marker that things were in turmoil, to say the least.  [ Continue reading ]

You’re Living for Nothing Now

We have been great admirers of the Lisbon-based publisher Pierre von Kleist editions for years and the latest release from the hands of its founder, photographer André Príncipe, named 'You´re Living for Nothing Now (I hope you´re keeping some kind of record)' is another instant favorite ours, following his extraordinary 'Tokyo Diaries' from 2014. The new title is Príncipe´s take on the I-novel, it is a personal account about how it felt to be alive between 2009 and 2013, translated to his photography. With its Leonard Cohen line´s title, the book forms Príncipe´s most ambitious work to date, organized in three books designed to be autonomous but together forming the complete narrative. The classical music score format of his earlier books is revisited and this time the images center on his struggle with marriage, living in Lisboa, spending time in China, Turkey, Japan, Paris, London and other places. Influenced by sufi and buddhist ideas. 'You´re living for nothing now' is a compendium of gestures, a modern mandala, an elegy of the ephemeral in the tradition of Ed van der Elsken, Henry Miller, and Jonas Mekas — making the publication another extraordinary addition to the catalogue of the inspirational folks at Pierre von Kleist. [ Continue reading ]

Flowers of Delusion

We recently encountered the work of Berlin-based photographer Dirk Müggenburg, who is best known for his remarkable still lifes and series of isolated shots from nature — all with a distinct cinematic quality and brooding mystique to them. His still lifes in particular are of an extraordinary beauty and predominantly the result of Müggenburg's obsession with flowers: both their inherent natural (decorative) beauty and the cultural position they hold. People use them as symbols to make statements of affection and mourning, which also means that people avoid them as they stand for vulnerability and doomed promises. It is very hard to view flowers as culturally neutral objects, for their vulnerable natural beauty arouse either admiration and desire or loathing due to cultural overexposure and negative connotations of kitsch. Müggenburg has explored this widespread hate-love relationship through a critical engagement with attraction, melancholia and sentiment in different series, all showing his extraordinary eye for detail and talent to create a distinct mood in his imagery.

The most diffuse series in his portfolio, aptly named 'Flowers of Delusion', is the one we love the most. As if taken behind a foggy window, the ensembles of flowers in vases are for the most part washed out over the frame, creating a photographic abstraction in the natural, pastel-like, color palette, without ever taking it beyond recognition. It is still very clear that this are flowers, but Müggenburg creates an atmosphere as if he is searching for a way to free them from their wide cultural affect — restoring what in our eyes is still the essence: extraordinary beauty. [ Continue reading ]

Yeesookyung

We have been deeply fascinated by the traditional Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum named 'kintsugi', from the moment we discovered it while researching for our optical project, which eventually became our neo-luxury brand Mottainai. Recently we discovered a next level of kintsugi-use, when we encountered the beautiful work of Korean artist Yeesookyung, who masterfully uses the technique to create incredible imperfect sculptures: biomorphic yet still elegant works, composed from mismatched porcelain through the centuries-old Japanese tradition. Her first series in the style, now 16 years old, titled 'Translated Vase' was inspired by a different artisan tradition, from her home country Korea, where porcelain works that are not deemed sublime are systematically destroyed. From that first series on, she has continued to make the fused pieces to growing international acclaim. Intrigued by these tossed aside works and shards, Yeesookyung began saving fragmented tea cups and pots rejected by contemporary masters. Honoring the works’ dismantled states, merging the unwanted works together in a way that heightens the beauty of their distress. In this way she blends diverse methods to form a contemporary process that evokes both the elegant designs of her homeland and the delicate rebuilding of damaged works in the Japanese tradition perfectly marrying aesthetics and craftsmanship. [ Continue reading ]