Innholdsfortegnelse for Volume 7, 2019 i W Magazine

Photographer, “Motoring On” (page 52) What is the first artwork you remember seeing, and what did it mean to you? Jonathan Borofsky, at the Walker Art Center in Minnesota, where I live. It was a sprawling show with paintings, sculptures, moving pieces, and drawings. For me, as a 15-year-old, it just felt full of possibilities. Who is the best artist of our time? There is no such thing as the best artist of our time. But I’m often asked, “If you could own artwork by anyone, who would it be?” And I answer, “James Turrell.” The kind of work I make and respond to tends to be emotionally intense or vulnerable, but the type of work that I want to live with is a Turrell Skyspace, this very serene thing.…

Writer, “#katemossbyrichardprince” (page 90) What is the first artwork you remember seeing, and what did it mean to you? I grew up in St. Louis, and the art museum there is fantastic. When I was a kid, my mom would take me to see this incredible Monet “Water Lilies” painting. I remember asking, “Why is it blurry?” Who is your biggest critic? My mom! What is the best place to view art today? Museums are some of the few places left where people walk around not staring at their phones. At least they should be!…

The artist Woody De Othello is a CrossFit devotee, so it’s hardly surprising that his work, too, is extremely physical. He makes large, intentionally clumsy ceramic sculptures that emulate and distort household furniture—stools, lamps, nightstands, and urns—and oversize appliances, like a wall-mounted telephone with a glossy red tongue for a receiver. It’s a theme he began four years ago while at the California College of the Arts, in San Francisco, where he made “a big-ass neti pot” based on the one he used for his persistent allergies. “I was in this mind-set of anthropomorphizing everyday objects,” De Othello, who is now 28, says. “I made the big pot with a fingernail at the end of it to reference picking your nose. If it makes me giggle, I’ll try to make…

Like two sisters sharing a closet, fashion and ballet have borrowed freely from each other for over a century. Taking their cues from dancers, fashion designers have proposed, and women have gladly adopted, gowns with fitted bodices and puffy skirts like tutus, leotards and leg warmers, and, in the wake of Schéhérazade—an Orientalist fever dream that Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes presented in Paris in 1910—harem pants and turbans. Likewise, choreographers have seized on the latest fashion trends for ballets that mirror society, set in ballrooms and drawing rooms; draping and construction from the haute couture have been appropriated for the stage. Fashion designers from Chanel to Rodarte have been commissioned to create ballet costumes. It’s fun to document these parallels, as Ballerina: Fashion’s Modern Muse, by Patricia Mears, does in fastidious…

The German artist Tobias Zielony often works at night, photographing teenagers hanging out in the phosphorescent haze of urban half-light—subjects whose sharp-edged cool is simultaneously dulled and enhanced by their intense vulnerability. “There’s darkness where you can hide, but also as a young person you want to be seen,” he says of nighttime’s paradoxical appeal. “So you go somewhere where you can show off.” Darkness also serves as a canvas for playing around with the possibilities of artificial light. “Neon creates its own kind of landscape,” he says. “It’s like a whole topography of different colors.” For his first editorial fashion shoot, Zielony photographed club kids and members of No Shade, a Berlin-based collective of female and nonbinary DJs, dressed in trench-coats that range from lithely tailored to voluminous and…

Writer, “Fresh Start” (page 124) What is the first artwork you remember seeing, and what did it mean to you? My mom is an artist, so some of my earliest memories involve her at work in her studio in our basement. Back then, she was doing these beautiful batik portraits and abstract fabric sculptures. I really owe my love of art to my mother. All we did as a family was go to museums. Who is the best artist of our time? For my generation, it’s Wade Guyton or Rachel Harrison. Best alive might be David Hammons or Marlene Dumas. Best of the 20th century was Alice Neel. Who is your biggest critic? The British. They tend to exenterate me every time I publish a book. Sadly for them, my…

In 2007, the artist Richard Prince appropriated celebrity paparazzi photos, dedicated them to himself (“To Richard Prince, Let’s Not and Say We Did, Jennifer Aniston”), and turned them into covers for W’s Art Issue. I was obsessed with those covers and thought of them often over the years. They merged the worlds of art, fashion, and pop culture seamlessly, using simple stock images. For this year’s Art Issue, we went back to Prince. Since the rise of social media, the artist has been exploring the idea of Instagram, and for this issue he created an iconic portrait of the most recognizable supermodel in the world, Kate Moss. We asked the photographer Nikolai von Bismarck (who is also Moss’s boyfriend) to take Polaroids of her, which we then sent to Prince,…

“Weaving is where the invention is for me,” Brackens says. “There’s so much room to coax out emotive qualities and lines and gestures from simple yarns.” Lake Mexia is a short, hot drive from the small town of Mexia, Texas, where the artist Diedrick Brackens was born. In 1981, three black teenagers drowned there while in police custody. Apprehended for marijuana possession, they were being rowed across the lake when the boat capsized. All three teenagers died, but the police officers survived and were later acquitted of any wrongdoing. The deaths occurred eight years before Brackens was born, but he heard different versions of the event “from every adult in town,” he says, and ultimately made an elliptical but powerful artwork out of the trauma: a golden tapestry that shows…

Moss was one of the first subjects of Prince’s inaugural series of Instagram paintings. “She didn’t know I was doing it, which was part of the attraction,” he says. “Usually, when you do a portrait of someone they are right in front of you. But now you don’t have to come and sit for me.” Richard Prince says he’s “post place.” Physically, the artist is in an Uber and on his way to LaGuardia Airport to catch a flight to Detroit. He’s talking to me on the phone and at the same time manipulating the image of Kate Moss that appears on the cover of this issue, and finalizing his captions, in a language he calls Birdtalk. Figuratively, however, Prince can be nowhere and everywhere at the same time, thanks…

If you’ve ever been lucky enough to attend a Proenza Schouler fashion show, you might have noticed a few telltale idiosyncrasies that set the brand’s presentations apart. Yes, the designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez have a predilection for vast industrial spaces with extra-starry wattage, and they prefer austere minimalism when it comes to sets and seating—all the better to call attention to their artful, haptic women’s wear, which fuses high aesthetic concepts with radical design wit and tech-savvy twists. But I’m referring to what happens on the sidelines, not on the runway. Every label has a friends section at its shows, but this one—perhaps the most New York–centric of all current claimants—has a boisterous hometown fan base of artists, musicians, actors, photographers, nightlife personalities, and whatever the rest of…

Model, “A Muse for All Times” (page 102) What is the first artwork you remember seeing, and what did it mean to you? As a young child, many of the paintings in the house I grew up in frightened me…they seemed so hypnotizing and alien at the same time. It wasn’t until I happened upon A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884, by Georges Seurat, in the Art Institute of Chicago at a very vulnerable moment in my life that the whole world of art really opened up for me. Who’s the best artist of our time? My favorite living artist is Peter Doig. Who is your biggest critic? Meeeeeee (I know I’m not alone here). What is the best place to view art today? Wherever you happen to be when…

Robin F. Williams The long tradition of figurative painting has had its ups and downs and its dead ends, but it has proved remarkably resilient in the long run: Artists as diverse as Dana Schutz, Elizabeth Peyton, and John Currin have found ways to make it fresh and exciting. The latest painter to stop viewers in their tracks with pictures of people is the Brooklyn-based Robin F. Williams, who recently showed a suite of new works, “With Pleasure,” at the Los Angeles gallery Various Small Fires. With a grasp of bold color and scale, she has especially excelled at painting monumental women who hold the picture plane commandingly, but who bring some humor to the party too. “I love giving the women in the paintings the agency to tell the…

When you walk into the home of Massimo De Carlo, one of Europe’s preeminent art dealers, the first object to catch your eye is not especially welcoming. On the ceiling in the entryway there’s a big water stain, its edges lumpy with layers of green and black mold. Below it there’s a plain metal bucket to catch the leakage. De Carlo, who moved into the home in 2016, knows that the unsightly stain makes visitors uncomfortable, because most of them never mention it. “They’re afraid to say anything,” he notes with an amused grin. “The house is brand new, so it’s a delicate matter. Only a few close friends will say, ‘Hey, what the hell is going on here?’” The leak is actually a work of art by the Scandinavian…

“On my first trip to New York, I was fascinated by the incredible craftsmanship of the Art Deco buildings. I tried to go back to those emotions with this collection. It’s about a rediscovery of American heritage.”—Nicolas Ghesquière…

It’s been said of the photographer Richard Avedon that his great genius as a portraitist was his ability to make famous faces funny and funny faces famous—and during a seminal period of the ’60s, when freewheeling flower power was colliding with Kennedy-era chic, there was no funny face more famous than Penelope Tree’s. Arresting in her beauty and unapologetically unique, with enormous eyes, barely there brows, and a kooky, revealing style that got her heckled on the street, Tree—a few days shy of her 17th birthday when she was discovered at Truman Capote’s legendary Black and White Ball—became the ultimate photographer’s muse. A particular pet of Diana Vreeland’s, she beguiled not just Avedon but also David Bailey, who, after turning his lens on her otherworldly visage, fell madly in love…

Who was the first person who taught you that you could break the rules? I did. I told myself there were no rules for me from very early on. My mother was very Catholic, and when I would say something crazy, she would cross herself and say, “What priest have I wounded to deserve this child?” Your last name at birth was García Rodriguez. Why did you change it to Hurtado? Because everyone in Venezuela, where I was born, is García or Rodriguez. So I took the name of a great-grandmother instead when I was a teenager and already painting. By the time I was 12, I was already making paintings of a stove. A stove? Yes. The flame, the blue with the black over it—it’s magic if you look…