This impressively analogue piece of kit is a custom drafting table, created by Madrid-based industrial design studio Caliper for the artist Daniel Arsham. Well known for his love of all things mechanical (and a former Wallpaper* cover creator), Arsham has worked with everyone from Tiffany & Co to Kohler and Hublot.

This particular project was strictly personal. Caliper, founded by the equally mechanically minded Quinner Baird in 2020, has taken the traditional drafting board and given it a distinctly contemporary twist. The ambition is to create the perfect surface and workspace for Arsham’s ongoing series of charcoal and graphite drawings, complete with a large-scale backlit surface and attached magnifying lamp.

Alongside this, the table incorporates a number of bespoke storage compartments – for tools, paper and charcoal – as well as lighting controls and the all-important charging ports. It's all formed from CNC machined aluminium, clear anodised and bead-blasted, with a high degree of bespoke manufacturing on display.

Every detail is out in the open, rather than hidden away, from the exposed gears of the lifting mechanism, with their perfectly machined winders, to the adjustable legs and sliding mechanism for the angled lamp on the rear of the board.

Caliper – recently seen on these pages with its colourful AA67 speaker for Alaska Alaska – built the entire drafting table in its Madrid studio before shipping it to Arsham’s HQ in New York.

Calip-er.com, @Calip.er

DanielArsham.com, @DanielArsham

It won’t have escaped your notice that artist Daniel Arsham really likes cars. From his ‘uchronic’ series of decayed and degraded full-scale car models to his ongoing fascination with Porsche, the New York-based artist has made the automobile a central focus of his practice.

This new twin volume book from ERG Media chronicles these works, from meticulous restorations and recreations of historic cars with new logos and decals in period correct colour and trim, to standalone non-driveable sculptures. These familiar works, with their inner cores of concrete, rock and crystal, treat the familiar forms of today’s mobility as ‘future relics of the present’, made ‘to appear as if they had just been unearthed after being buried for ages.’

The full sweep of Arsham’s aesthetic is on display, whether it’s intended for gallery consumption or for use on an actual racetrack – witness his bespoke design for Lewis Hamilton’s helmet, or the livery for Porsche 992 GT3 Cup car raced in 1993 by Arthur Mathieu.

For lovers of art cars and race cars alike, Arsham Motorsport captures a very singular and informed approach to automotive creativity. There’s also information about Arsham’s foray into the short-lived world of NFTs, as well as the small editions of larger artworks that tap into the packaging aesthetic and collectability of scale model cars.

ERG Media, which was founded in 2017, often acts as a nexus for art and automobiles, with ultra-high production values and an ongoing collaboration with Porsche, which teamed up with ERG for the Artifacts archive book, amongst other things. Arsham Motorsport is presented in a concrete grey linen slipcase, which has been foil-embossed with graphics using Daniel Arsham’s signature green. Original photography throughout is by Thomas Walk, ERG Media’s art director.

Arsham Motorsport, €295, ERG.media, @ERG.media, DanielArsham.com, @DanielArsham

Mai Ikuzawa concedes that white denim is perhaps not the best thing to wear when oil, grease and racing fuel are all around. But she didn’t want her capsule clothing collection – launched together with the American artist Daniel Arsham at Goodwood Revival earlier in 2024 and now online – to be the usual motoring merchandise, which tends to mean lots of baseball caps.

‘I wanted something properly high-end, especially since Japanese-made products are still recognised for their craft and quality,’ she says. ‘It was bad enough with all the mud [at the UK motoring event this year], with me freaking out about my brand-new Nikes.’

Ikuzawa comes from prime motoring stock – she is the daughter of Tetsu Ikuzawa, the Japanese former racing driver and racing team manager, the first Japanese driver to compete in European championships (key years being from the late 1960s through to the 1980s), and a man appreciated for both his personal style and the bold red graphics, crane logo and typography he designed as his racing colours.

It’s those – filtered through Arsham’s lens – that grace the likes of trunk bags, stadium and varsity jackets and long-sleeve T-shirts in the streetwear-oriented Team Ikuzawa collection, which Mai Ikuzawa and Arsham unveiled alongside a Porsche 904 GTS in bespoke livery, one set to make appearances at various motoring events during 2025, including The Ice at St Moritz in February.

‘Other teams said they’d never seen anything like it [when my father unveiled the designs],’ says Mai Ikuzawa, who is now slowly reviving the Team Ikuzawa archive – notably its documentary photography, racing overalls and a number of vintage Porsches – and operates a brand consultancy. This, Bow Wow International, specialises in advising automotive companies such as Rolls-Royce, BMW, Aston Martin and the Venturi Grand Prix Team on their lifestyle strategies

‘[With Team Ikuzawa] there was a combination of fashion and art that back then which was very rare in motorsports,’ she adds. ‘Obviously I don’t think I would have been so into style or cars without his influence. I’d be given a lot of toy cars, go motor crossing. It was the kind of brainwashing I now put my own children through. But [years later] there’s still an aesthetic side to car culture that is under-explored.’

Ikuzawa, who also released a limited edition watch in collaboration with Tag Heuer last year and is now working on a second capsule collection, argues that the motorsports world has yet to successfully bridge the gap with luxury lifestyle: ‘Some partnerships feel a little forced, as though the two worlds don’t yet understand each other yet,’ the trained stunt driver argues. Perhaps rectifying this, she suggests, could also be a way for the industry to embrace growing interest in cars among women.

‘It’s quite disappointing to me to see how women are still excluded from the car world. Go to a [luxury] car dealership and you’ll experience a tremendous amount of sexism – the assumption that you must be someone’s girlfriend,’ says Ikuzawa, who also considers herself a champion for Japan’s ‘overlooked’ car culture (‘Ask people to name cool cars and, unfairly, not many people will cite the likes of Nissan,’ she notes).

‘Maybe it’s because a car is such an ego-driven product for many men. But there needs to be more women in motorsport and car culture generally. And one way in is less emphasis on engine parts and more on the style and the sense of adventure that cars embody. There’s a softer way for car culture to be presented, and that’s what I’d like to pursue.’

Team Ikuzawa, @TeamIkuzawa

BowWowInternational.com

DanielArsham.com, @DanielArsham

Photography by Tom Shaxson

Another partnership between artist Daniel Arsham and American manufacturer Kohler seemed inevitable, following the rapturous reception of their 3D-printed ceramic sink ‘Rock.01’ collaboration, which made its debut at Design Miami in 2021. Now, the artist is back with equally refreshing new bathroom designs, bringing a playful mood to the smallest room in the house.

Daniel Arsham ‘Landshapes’ for ‘Arsham in Kohler’

The new bathroom collection is titled ‘Landshapes’ and is part of an expansive collaborative project – ‘Arsham in Kohler’ – that includes large-scale sculptures, golf merchandise, and a custom-designed cabin at Destination Kohler, the brand’s resort on the shores of Lake Michigan.

It is inside this ‘Arsham Cabin’ that the collection has taken up residence. Following the organic form of the ‘Rock.01’ sink, the ‘Landshapes’ collection shares the artist and brand's commitment to pushing the boundaries of manufacture. It comprises a free-standing tub that appears carved or hewn, ethereal vanities that are inspired by Arsham's time spent in Japan, and a basin with glass faucet handles that enhance the serene appeal of flowing water.

A mirror directly above the sink acts like a reflective puddle encased in a wooden frame. Atmosphere and tactility come from warm, decorative pendant and sconce lighting and Kohler WasteLAB tiles made from recycled materials, inspired by the ridged patterns made by sand deposits in the wake of the receding tide.

The cabin is part of the Kohler Cabin Collection and can be reserved by resort guests. It is accompanied by six large sculptures, carefully positioned by the artist across the resort, in locations including the golf club. The bronze pieces are designed to invite guests into ‘the world of Arsham’ within the world of Kohler, and the spectacular Midwest landscape beyond.

To conclude the collaboration (for now), the artist worked alongside Malbon Golf club to release a collection of merchandise finished in his signature teal patina, which also graces the roof of the Arsham Cabin.

The ‘Landshapes’ collection is featured in the Arsham Cabin, with a commercial launch set for later in 2024, destinationkohler.com

A partnership was a natural prospect for watchmaker Hublot and artist Daniel Arsham, who have each championed a collaborative ethos in respective projects that criss-cross the worlds of art and design (from Hublot’s watches with Takashi Murakami, to Arsham’s own watch designs and partnerships with the likes of Tiffany & Co).

Now, the watchmaker and the artist have united for a new timepiece, limited to 99 pieces, which celebrates this spirit of crossover, drawing from both traditional and futuristic references. The Arsham Droplet, crafted from a mix of titanium and rubber, can be a pocket watch, a table clock or a pendant suspended on titanium chains, its smooth contours making it a comfortable fit to hold in the hand.

Hublot and Daniel Arsham’s Droplet

‘By combining Hublot's technical expertise with my own artistic vision, we have created a timepiece that transcends the traditional pocket watch, blending the past, present and future in a captivating and unexpected way,’ says Arsham of the multidisciplinary piece. In a rethink of the parameters of traditional watch design, the Droplet cuts an unconventional silhouette, imbuing its tough materials with an unexpected delicacy in the domed teardrop-shaped crystals, which flank a titanium case seemingly woven as if it were lace.

‘Together with Daniel, we made the impossible possible,’ adds Hublot CEO Ricardo Guadalupe. ‘The Arsham Droplet is a testament to Hublot's unwavering dedication to pushing the boundaries of both form and function. This groundbreaking timepiece is a true work of art, blending our horological expertise with Daniel Arsham's artistic vision.’

hublot.com

Daniel Arsham and Perrotin are marking 20 years of collaboration with simultaneous exhibitions in Paris and New York. Arsham will debut new work in ‘20 Years / 20 Ans’, alongside his paintings and sculptures.

‘I have been working with the gallery since its first opening in Paris, and since then our passions and careers respectively have evolved and expanded dramatically,’ says Arsham (recently featured in the Wallpaper* USA 300 guide to creative America). ‘Twenty years on feels like the right time to reflect on this journey. My work outside of what some might consider part of the traditional art world will feature in the exhibitions, alongside work that sits within these parameters. The focus explores an evolution of craftsmanship and expertise, and how my early work can influence my work today or tomorrow.’

The exhibitions encompasses a new collaboration with Star Wars, reinterpreted classical sculptures, paintings in a new impasto paint developed by Arhsam to depict the richness of the Renaissance and as yet unseen sketches on hotel stationery. An eclectic curation, it continues to explore his fascination with the notion of time as a fluid concept, juxtaposing classical motifs with contemporary styling.

Daniel Arsham and Perrotin’s ‘20 Years / 20 Ans’

‘The exhibitions demonstrate a variety of mediums and scales, from paintings, drawings, to sculptures,’ Arsham says. ‘I have always been fascinated by material, reflection and scale, from the ideas of archaeology to crystallisation to architecture – for example, one series of works plays with materiality in various types of metal, while in another series of bucolic landscape paintings, I’ve manipulated scale to create the sense of collapsed sculptures. 

‘I’ve also included a series of drawings which were early experiments on small, branded notebook-style paper found in hotels. This years-long process acts as a documentation of my thoughts and ideas throughout my global travels, almost a diary, showing ideas I went on to develop at a later stage, and inspirations I have gathered along the way.’

For Emmanuel Perrotin, the collaboration is a natural one. ‘I met Daniel when he was 22 years old, an emerging artist living in his studio, and I was immediately drawn to his incredible talent and distinct vision. Daniel’s practice breaks the boundaries of fine art and exists across industries. As his success has grown, he has been able to keep his practice open to a broad audience, as a leader in editions, collaborations, and a widespread internet presence, which is admirable. It has been a pleasure to grow with Daniel, our gallery expanding alongside his career.’

Daniel Arsham presents ‘20 Years / 20 Ans’ at Perrotin Paris (until 7 October) and New York (until 14 October), alongside a selection of works on display at The Standard hotel, New York, London and Bangkok

perrotin.com

An artist who creates by breaking, and a designer who creates things to be broken: American artist Daniel Arsham and Oki Sato of Japanese design firm Nendo have engaged in a dialogue spanning over four years, culminating in their latest collaboration titled 'Break to Make', debuting at Milan Design Week 2023. 

Their collection of works transcends the boundaries between art and design, showcasing each designer's specific yet uniquely poetic approach to materials and form. Nendo's minimalist and precise forms are given new life by Arsham, who deconstructs and transforms them into functional and playful works, each piece telling a unique story of destruction and rebirth. 

This intersection of two opposite perspectives is a hallmark of the collaboration. Arsham's expression of present objects as past artifacts is counterbalanced by Nendo's ability to create present objects that anticipate the future. The resulting works invite viewers to look beyond the surface and embrace the beauty of transformation.

Nendo's streamlined designs are reinterpreted by Arsham through his unique 'eroded' approach: 'After we create objects with no intended use, Daniel creates new functions by breaking them,' says Sato. For instance, Arsham hammers a bathtub into a love seat, or carves a bench from a narrow block. '[We are] an artist who expresses present objects as past artifacts, and a designer who makes present objects that anticipate the future. The collaboration may be seen as an overlay of these two contrary perspectives,' adds Sato.

The special installation, staged at Nendo's Milan office, provides a unique opportunity for visitors to witness first-hand the synergy between these two creative forces. 'Break to Make' is a poetic and harmonious exhibition resulting from the collision of different disciplines, transcending our preconceived notions of time and space. A series of customised items, such as T-Shirts and keychains, are available to be purchased on site. Don’t miss the short cartoon series with the two characters, Oki and Daniel, building and breaking things.

Break to Make is on view 18-23 April 2023, reserve a ticket here

Nendo
Via Pinamonte da Vimercate 4
Milan

Break to Make T-shirts, caps, and keychains are available on Nendo's online shop

Tiffany & Co is celebrating the new Tiffany Lock collection with a second collaboration with artist Daniel Arsham, who has created a special edition of 99 sculptures and a limited edition bangle.

The Bronze Eroded Tiffany Padlock sculpture nods to Tiffany & Co’s history, with the jewellery house’s sales of functional padlocks dating from the late 19th century. It was a motif soon assimilated into designs from key rings, money clips and brooches to today’s new Tiffany Lock collection.

Tiffany Lock bracelets

In the sculpture, Arsham nods both to this heritage and the aesthetic of his Future Relics series, which rethinks today’s objects as items of historical note (his recent collaboration with Rimowa placed an ‘eroded’ turntable inside a suitcase). Here, the eroded bronze sculptures, treated with a hand-applied patina, intertwine references both to Tiffany & Co’s distinctive blue hue and the natural erosion that comes with time. Inside, a concealed Tiffany & Co x Arsham Studio Lock bangle set with diamonds and tsavorites nods to the vivid green first seen in Tiffany & Co creations in 1974.

The new piece builds on this year’s jewellery collection, Tiffany Lock, itself an elegant symbol of functional design. Four new styles in 18ct yellow and rose gold feature a clasp with a swivelling mechanism, in an echo of the padlock’s form.

‘The collection was designed with the idea of re-envisioning the padlock – a product Tiffany had offered prior to the 1950s. We transformed it into a symbol of unbreakable bonds and inclusivity with the spirit of  “No Rules. All welcome”.  Tiffany Lock is meant for everyone,’ says Alexandre Arnault, executive vice president, product and communications at Tiffany & Co. ‘Taking influence from the padlock, the mechanism behind Lock echoes its functionality and was specifically designed by our Tiffany Jewelry Design and Innovation Workshop. The clasp opens and closes when the U-bar is pulled from the notch area, which activates the spring inside the bracelet.’  

The new design stays faithful to Tiffany & Co’s distinctive chic minimalism. Adds Arnault: ‘Our designs are rooted in balancing our heritage with modernity and the new Tiffany Lock bangles are a great example of this approach.’

tiffany.co.uk

In 2006, artist Daniel Arsham was invited by Merce Cunningham to design a stage set. The legendary choreographer famously collaborated with leading artists including Robert Rauschenberg, so his decision to work with the young Arsham was a testament to the latter’s gift for statement. 

Almost two decades on, Arsham recalls working with Cunningham as he gives a tour of his first outdoor exhibition, ‘Relics in the Landscape’ at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. He cites this opportunity to work on the huge scale required for a stage set as having a major impact on his future practice. He now works across drawing, sculpture and in the metaverse, and one thing that is apparent throughout all his work is his comfort with tackling the monumental, both literally and conceptually.

The show combines new and older sculptures that draw from three millennia of cultural references. Three works were cast from moulds taken from pieces from the Greek and Roman wing at the Louvre, while others reference icons of 20th-century pop culture, including ET’s bicycle and Bugs Bunny. 

‘I went to the facility outside Paris where the Louvre keeps all of its moulds,’ Arsham explains to Wallpaper*. ‘They have moulds of every stone sculpture that is owned by the French ministry of culture. It’s about preservation, but it’s also a bit of a colonial idea, like, they would ship a cast of the Venus de Milo to Algiers and put it in the embassy. It was fortunate that they actually did that because a lot of these  works degrade over time.’

The visit to the Louvre’s archives stemmed from Arsham’s friendship with Ludovic Laugier, the national heritage curator in charge of Greek sculpture in the museum’s department of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities. As the artist explored the museum’s collections of ancient sculpture, he was particularly drawn to the Venus of Arles, which dates to the 1st century BC. Given its status in the French national collection, Laugier advised him that the only way he would be given permission to work with the sculpture would be to write a thesis. 

Two years and one thesis later, Arsham was granted permanent access to the entire collection and cast several works, including those installed in the park today. The agreement came with two conditions: that he complete the casting process in France, and that he didn’t damage the original moulds.  

On entering the landscaped garden, we are greeted with Bronze Eroded Melpomene (2021), a head half buried in the landscape, its surface eroded to a blue-marbled patina which is at once growing and decaying. Nearby is Bronze Crystallized Seated Pikachu (2022), equally eroded to take on the appearance of an archaeological ruin. Meanwhile, a crystallised rendition of ET’s bicycle seems to emerge from a large pond. These apparent relics of the modern and ancient ages are placed on land that has been privately owned and sold on through the generations for 1,000 years, this presents us with another twist in our perception of time, something Arsham says he is fond of playing with to challenge us as we view his work.  

‘I've got Pikachu and I've got the Venus of Arles, both rendered in bronze and with these erosions in them. The erosions have crystallisation in them. They may look like they're in a state of decay, but we also associate crystals with growth, right? So, they could either be falling apart, or actually growing to some kind of completion. I like that kind of mixing-up that's happening there.’

Exposed to the elements, Arsham’s works change in the light as it changes throughout the day, and over the seasons that the show is on view. 

Arsham aims to confuse, and relishes the contradictions he throws up in placing cartoon characters alongside ancient sculpture. But these works have more in common than you might think. Pop-cultural touchstones have loomed large throughout our lives, seeming like they have always been there; meanwhile, many ancient works are copies themselves and have been repeatedly altered over the centuries or even millennia. Venus was originally Aphrodite, and was even controversially slimmed down in popular portrayals in the 1920s. Some of these alterations have since been reversed in more recent artistic interpretations. 

By playing with time and shortening history, Arsham is making us aware of the brevity of our existence. He recalls that his childhood home in Florida was destroyed in a hurricane and was rebuilt to be exactly the same. The effects of this experience resurface in his work time and again. From his 365-day NFT to his design work and stage design, he applies his vision seamlessly across disciplines. 

‘The only difference for me is that with architecture or design, it has a specific function. Art, it can have a function, but its function is not defined. Right? It's open. It's purposeless in a way, but in a way, that openness is kind of its purpose.’

Daniel Arsham: 'Relics in the Landscape' is at Yorkshire Sculpture Park with no current end date, ysp.org.uk; danielarsham.com

Rimowa’s Pilot Case, as its name suggests, was originally designed with airline staff in mind. Its compact form allows it to slide neatly into the space between pilot seats; it opens from above (rather than along the side), which facilitates access to its contents while in flight; and it’s constructed from aviation-inspired aluminium, which is both resilient and thematically appropriate. It comes as no surprise that the case achieved a cult following among its intended audience at launch in 1994. Less expected was its popularity among musicians and DJs, who favoured the design to protect vinyl and mixing equipment while on the road.

The latter usage serves as the inspiration for the limited-edition Rimowa x Daniel Arsham Eroded Turntable in Pilot Case, which launches on 7 October 2022. This is the second collaboration between the German luggage label and the American artist, following on from Arsham’s interpretation of the Rimowa Classic Attaché in 2019. Back then, Arsham had presented a sculpture of the attaché, eroded to evoke the passage of time, within a contemporary edition of the same attaché; here, the special edition Pilot Case contains not a sculptural version of itself but rather a sculpture of a turntable. 

Rimowa and Arsham started working on their Pilot Case during the pandemic, but as the artist explains, the roots of the project can be traced back to the mid-2000s, when he first encountered Rimowa luggage on a trip to Japan and developed a fondness for the brand. ‘People there used a lot of Rimowa, and it seemed so technical and brilliant,’ he recalls. Now a loyal Rimowa user, he admires both the brand’s engineering prowess, and the lifetime guarantee it offers with each product. ‘You can send dented and damaged luggage to Rimowa, who will hammer out the aluminium and change the wheels out, so it’s back to perfect again. But the case keeps these marks on it, like a patina, a record of its history.’

The same sense of history is ever present in Arsham’s work, particularly in his Fictional Archaeology series, which uses geological materials to create eroded casts of modern artefacts: clocks, cameras, keyboards, headphones, and indeed, turntables. The artist says, ‘these casts are about time shift and dislocation. You’re looking at an object that looks like an archaeological relic, but at the same time, it’s an object that you know from your own experience. That sort of confusion is where the work lies.’

Within his new Rimowa collaboration, the turntable – which is hand-cast from white plaster, and incorporates crushed glass in its eroded areas – is virtually life-size, and meticulously detailed down to the headshell, counterweight and pitch controls. A record, which appears to have been left in the turntable the moment it was fossilised, bears the Arsham Studio and Rimowa logos, the latter modified to incorporate the artist’s double-A emblem.

It is sheathed in a removable protection foam, and slotted vertically into an equally covetable Pilot Case – Arsham has retained the case’s distinctive form and grooved aluminium construction while putting his own stamp on the design with clusters of logos. These mimic the stickers that travellers often use to distinguish their luggage from other near-identical pieces that they may encounter on a conveyor belt, but are in fact anodised into the aluminium, so they too will stand the test of time. ‘All the imagery references historical Rimowa graphics that we found in the archive. They have catalogues dating back to the 1950s, and it was interesting for me to tap into that zeitgeist,’ he describes. Among Rimowa logos from ages past are Arsham’s name, redrawn in various midcentury typefaces. There’s also a ‘Rimowa man’ graphic from the 1960s, who appears to balance a ridged case on his right index finger.

Arsham additionally made minor alterations to a plaque on the outside of the case, the locks, and the labelling on the wheels (‘These are Easter eggs that sit within the design, to differentiate it from regular Pilot cases,’ he says). But crucially, the case has the same multi-wheel system and telescopic handle that is a hallmark of Rimowa’s usual products, so the collector can actually use it like any other piece of luggage if they are so inclined.

The accompanying leather luggage tag, in a specific shade of mint green that Arsham has used for over a decade, is currently not available for individual sale, though one imagines it would be highly sought after in its own right. Also presented with the special edition Pilot Case is a pair of art-handling gloves, another Arsham signature. It helps the user keep the artwork free of fingerprints, and adds a sense of ritual that makes the unboxing experience all the more pleasurable. 

Five hundred models in a silver Pilot Case will be available in Europe, North America and South America on 7 October, while another 500 in a black case will be sold exclusively in Asia. Considering the fervent enthusiasm that Rimowa and Arsham inspire among their admirers, this collaboration seems destined to sell out rapidly.

Just as importantly, it has been an enriching experience for both parties. ‘Daniel’s creative mind is fascinating, so it’s exciting for both our creative and engineering teams to collaborate with him and create something special,’ summarises Emelie de Vitis, chief marketing officer of Rimowa. Arsham adds, ‘A lot of my work relies on some level of imperfection, and that’s definitely not the case with Rimowa. It’s all about precision, so being able to work in that scenario was interesting.’

INFORMATION

Rimowa x Daniel Arsham Eroded Turntable in Pilot Case, limited edition of 500 in Silver (Europe, North America and South America only) and 500 in black (exclusive to Asia), €3,000, rimowa.com; danielarsham.com

Daniel Arsham is the sort of creative who flies in the face of pigeonholes. Over two decades, the New York-based artist has gained meteoric global attention through a rule-bending blend of architecture, art, design, performance, sculpture and satire. 

Arsham’s inimitable breed of futurism is alluring yet apocalyptic, prophetic yet playful. From Pokémon to Porsche, Pharrell Williams’ keyboard to Wallpaper’s 25th-anniversary cover, little has escaped Arsham’s divine erosions.

His sculptural work shows how manmade fragility can collide with the tenacity of geological material. It imagines a future too close for comfort: when humanity’s turbo-charged industrial and technological world implodes in the wake of digital dematerialisation. 

Beyond institutional and gallery shows, his prolific output has involved collaborations with an eclectic mix of brands (among them Tiffany’s, Heinz, Adidas, Rimowa, and Dior), alongside ambitious spatial interventions under Snarkitecture, the collaborative design studio he co-founded with Alex Mustonen.

On Arsham’s characteristically full agenda is a carte blanche at Marseille’s MAMO Cité Radieuse Arts Center, upcoming solo shows at Perrotin Tokyo and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, as well as the opening of the artist’s new exhibition space in Bridgehampton. 

At home with Daniel Arsham

Wallpaper*: Where are you right now? 

Daniel Arsham: I am currently in my studio in New York preparing for the opening of my newest exhibition at Perrotin Tokyo (from 27 August), entitled: ‘31st Century Still Lifes’.

W*: Where and when are you most productive?

DA: My office at home or in the studio, generally with music playing and lots of visual inspirations in front of me. For example, in my studio many works are hanging from the ceiling or on the walls, there’s lots of movement everywhere.

W*: What’s the last thing you watched? 

DA: The latest Star Wars series, The Mandalorian.

W*: What do you love about intersections and the exchange between creative disciplines?

DA: I love the possibility for nuance when things you might not first consider to be paired are blended or in collaboration with one another.

W*: Who is your dream collaborator? 

DA: I’ve been lucky enough to work with several of my dream collaborators, however, it would be incredible to work with Apple.

W*: How do you switch off?

DA: I am quite busy, there’s not much time to switch off. Finding moments of calm or moments of inspiration during travel is generally how I relax.

W*: What one piece of advice would you give to the next generation?

DA: Don’t let discouragement stop you from trying and failing, over and over. 

INFORMATION

’Le Modulor du Basketball ’at MAMO Centre d’art de la Cité Radieuse, Marseille runs until 25 September. mamo.fr

’31st Century Still Lifes’, 27 August - 15 October 2022 at Perrotin New York. perrotin.com

’Relics in the Landscape’, from 1 October, Yorkshire Sculpture Park. ysp.org.uk

American multidisciplinary artist Daniel Arsham is no stranger to collaboration. In 2021 alone, he has already melded his signature aesthetic with the likes of Porsche, Tiffany & Co, and Pokemon, showcasing his uncanny ability to flex his creative muscles while still remaining true to the essence of his work. Arsham’s ethos has played well with a wide range of brands, the most recent of which is US kitchen and bathroom behemoth Kohler, with whom he has designed a limited-edition sink. Created using Kohler’s cutting-edge technology, the sink, named ‘Rock.01’, is Kohler’s first artist collaboration in many years. 

A 3D-printed ceramic sink by Daniel Arsham and Kohler

The 3D-printed sink continues the same line of thinking that Arsham explored with his ‘Objects for Living II’ furniture collection, presented at the Friedman Benda gallery in September. Confined to his Long Island home during the early months of the pandemic, he experimented with materials that were easily at hand – found rocks and stones, and his sons’ collection of Play-Doh, which he would use to create hand-pressed forms. ‘Rock.01’ poetically ties these organic elements together. Featuring an asymmetric vitreous basin, which leans against a rock-shaped form cast from brass, and with the same recognisable patina as Arsham’s bronze sculptural works, the sink design is a true industry first.

‘Kohler reached out to me about a year and a half ago, specifically about a new technology that they had been developing around 3D-printed ceramics,’ recalls Arsham. ‘The technology is pretty nascent, but beyond being able to do some incredible things that are not possible with traditional slip casting, there’s a huge sustainability factor. There’s very little waste and it uses a lot less water than regular casting methods. I wanted to create something that would be iconic or representative of the technology itself, and I wanted to go big.’

Arsham has also incorporated a reverent nod to Kohler’s 148-year history in the design, to create that tension between past, present and future that has characterised his work. ‘When I originally designed the sink, there were two components that looked like one stone was resting on top of another,’ he says. ‘But after realising that Kohler made cast iron bathtubs in the late 19th century, I ended up using a cast brass base that has a familiar patina to the rest of my bronze work. It’s a nice juxtaposition of this heritage material that feels very worn and old, alongside a new futuristic material.

‘One of the super interesting things about the 3D-printed surface is that it’s actually quite imperfect,’ Arsham adds. ‘There are some flaws in it and, in some ways, it looks more handmade than the other sinks that Kohler produces now.’

‘Rock.01’ will makes its debut at Design Miami as part of an installation designed by Arsham to mark Kohler’s first time at the fair. Released in a limited edition of 99, the inspiring design effortlessly unites Arsham’s and Kohler’s worlds, even though that might have seemed unlikely at first glance. In truth, Kohler’s affiliation with the arts runs deep. Not only has the company been a long-standing supporter of the John Michael Kohler Center, an organisation offering an artist residency programme at the donated home of the company’s founder, it also runs the Kohler Foundation, which has championed the arts and education through grants, scholarships, art preservation efforts and a performing arts series since 1940. 

To David Kohler, CEO and president of Kohler, the company’s partnership with Arsham, which stemmed from its relationship with the art consulancy, The Art Lab, could not be more seamless. ‘We have a shared ethos on the topics of innovation, pushing boundaries and thinking differently,’ he says. ‘Many of Daniel’s works are an homage to time, where future meets past. To us, 3D-printed ceramics are exactly that – juxtaposing one of our most heritage material sets with a new production mechanism. We knew Daniel would be an authentic partner to bring it to market with us for the first time. We had spent three years with this technology before bringing Daniel onboard, and we used those learnings to establish some technical parameters. With those foundational fence posts, the canvas for the final design itself was entirely his to create.’

INFORMATION

kohlercollective.com
danielarsham.com

Throughout the last 25 years, Wallpaper* has borne witness to the rise of many creative careers. The meteoric ascent of the American multidisciplinary artist Daniel Arsham, over the past 15 of those years, has been one of the highlights, especially since his eroded, Future Relic objects and aesthetic are now instantly recognisable and synonymous with a cultish cool. Beyond institutional and gallery shows, his prolific creative practice includes collaborations with fashion labels like Kith and hip-hop moguls such as Pharrell Williams, under the Snarkitecture name, the collaborative design studio he co-founded with Alex Mustonen. 

To mark Wallpaper’s big birthday milestone, we invited Arsham to create our limited-edition cover this month, which features our very own logo rendered in the artist’s signature style (typically reserved for pop-cultural icons of the past and present, such as telephones, Pokemon, boomboxes and supercars). Speaking about the cover design, Arsham says, ‘The cover artwork imagines the Wallpaper* magazine as an eroding version of itself found in a distant future. The masthead has fallen from its normal position on the top of the magazine and is instead crumbling near the bottom of the magazine.’

The recognisable cover treatment is a poetic counterpoint to Arsham’s second furniture collection, ‘Objects for Living II’, which is currently being exhibited at design gallery Friedman Benda in New York City. Building on the first collection of furniture that Arsham produced for the gallery in 2019, these new additions see Arsham continue his exploration of structural, material and temporal contrasts in functional form. His new work features hand-sculpted forms, originally made in Play-Doh – one of the materials readily available to Arsham while he was in lockdown at home with his family last year, and a vibrant colour palette to match. The highly considered furniture offering, which includes a bed, dining chairs, a dining table and a sofa among others, showcases an exciting new direction for the artist, which we look forward to observing for many years to come.

Subscribe to Wallpaper* today and receive limited-edition, artist-designed covers on your doorstep every month. For digital-only subscriptions, a special offer of 12 issues for $12 /£12 / €12 is currently available. 

INFORMATION

Daniel Arsham’s cover is the latest addition to the Wallpaper* limited-edition cover series, which features a specially created artwork by a different artist, architect or designer each issue, available exclusively to subscribers. 

The prolific multimedia artist Daniel Arsham may be synonymous with his Future Relic series, which casts ubiquitous objects, such as Pokémon, supercars and sneakers, as historical artefacts, calcified, eroded and unearthed a thousand years from now. But it’s his new additions to a line of furniture that are currently stealing the limelight. 

This follow-up effort was developed off the back of his debut furniture collection from 2019, Objects for Living, which the artist exhibited at Design Miami that year with New York design gallery Friedman Benda. It sees Arsham continue his exploration of structural, material and, of course, temporal contrasts in a truly functional form. The new pieces, which include lighting, a sofa, and a dining table and chair, are being presented as part of Arsham’s first solo show with Friedman Benda (until 25 September 2021).

Daniel Arsham furniture: Objects for Living

Arsham’s foray into furniture design is no surprise. He studied design and architecture in high school in Miami, but then pivoted to art at the Cooper Union in New York after he wasn’t accepted into its architecture programme. Arsham’s long-standing interest in design continues to be evident in his involvement in Snarkitecture, the multidisciplinary practice he co-founded with Alex Mustonen in 2007. The firm is known for its pioneering spatial interventions and immersive experiences for celebrities, brands such as Cos and Lexus, and real estate developers including Related Companies and Central Group, often realised in its signature greyscale palette.

Objects for Living emerged from Arsham’s desire to create pieces to fit his weekend home on Long Island, a modest yet distinctive bungalow designed by American architect Norman Jaffe in 1971, which the artist acquired in 2017. Inspired by Jaffe’s juxtaposition of curves and angles, Arsham designed several armchairs, a desk, a floor lamp and a rug for his personal use within the house. This inevitably caught the eye of gallerist Marc Benda, who saw the merit of revealing this other facet of the artist’s practice to the public.

Although some of the pieces from the inaugural series subscribed to Arsham’s distinctive fossilised aesthetic, others took on more organic, assemblage-like forms, which is the direction Arsham has expanded in for this second iteration, a reflection of the extensive time he spent at the house with his young family during the pandemic, along with the types of pieces he wants to live with.

‘Most of the design for this happened during the lockdown in New York,’ Arsham recalls. ‘I had gone out to the house in early March and I didn’t really have a lot of materials or things there with me. I started sculpting with Play-Doh, which my boys had loads of, and started modelling different types of forms. I wasn’t thinking that those would be the final forms, but I let them dry and when we came out of lockdown, I ended up just getting them 3D-scanned.’

Each piece’s hand-formed components retain all the idiosyncrasies of sculpting in Play-Doh, from the rough edges and indentations on the back of an armchair to the organically-shaped legs of the dining table. Realised in a combination of wood, resin and stone, each sculptural piece has a naive, almost primitive appearance that taps into Arsham’s fascination with blurring and warping time, albeit without the usual archaeological overtones.

Materials and manufacturing techniques

‘There’s a material difference between the two collections. Most of the first collection was [made from] resin and sculpted digitally,’ explains Arsham. The new pieces express ‘a material transformation. There are pieces that are solid stone, solid resin and then hollow resin, where you see the light push through it. There’s also this wood technique that we’ve been using in the studio that gives all of these amazing patterns.’ 

Deployed on the seat of a chair, for example, the technique produces a boisterous wood grain that mirrors the topography of the sculpted wood. ‘I achieve this variation by laminating the plywood, tilting the whole thing on an axis, then milling it as if it was flat,’ he says. ‘Once you start milling, you get these patterns that are impossible to predict because of the angle of the grain.’

Visual appeal aside, Arsham has also focused on the comfort and practicality of each piece, inspired by the balancing of form and function in Wendell Castle’s ‘Triad’ chair (2006), which sits in his studio. ‘I usually start with the chairs because they are the most generic form. Once I had everything sculpted, we milled it in foam and then I changed the scale and pitch of things for ergonomics so that it actually feels comfortable,’ he says. ‘When you sit in the armchair, your body fits in it correctly. I want these things to actually be used. They’re not sculptures that won’t be touched.’

A highlight of the new ten-piece collection is an ambitious bed frame, which Arsham conceived for the Brooklyn brownstone that he purchased last autumn. ‘I still just have a mattress on the floor because I’m waiting to finish this bed,’ he laughs. ‘Every single thing that I want in a bed is in this, from the storage underneath to the charging ports and reading lamps; it has underlight, it has backlight and a task light. The way the light feels is based on different conditions.’ Some details were inspired by Arsham’s stays at hotels in Asia: ‘There’s a small bench on the end of it that you can sit on if you’re putting your socks on. It’s a very whimsical design.’

With a headboard formed by individual organic shapes, the asymmetrical bed facilitates an interplay of light and shadow that transforms it into a sculptural art piece. ‘The wall that it will sit on doesn’t need anything else. I don’t have to put an artwork on the wall because the bed becomes that,’ Arsham adds. Completed with recessed drawers that are concealed from view, nightstands on either side that are integrated into the overall form, and reading lights that can be tucked away, the low bed frame cuts a strong yet seductive figure.

‘As abstract as some of the first designs were, I shaped the pieces to fit the body perfectly, even if they looked like the most uncomfortable things ever. There’s a counterintuitive thing you can have with furniture,’ Arsham explains. ‘With artwork, sometimes the visual quality of the thing is different from what it makes you feel or what it means. With furniture, or design objects that you actually touch, there’s a different level of possibility in the contrast between how it looks and feels. Even though this collection has things that are very playful, I really spent a lot of time on the ergonomics, to make sure they work for what they’re supposed to do. Every single thing that I’ve designed furniture-wise, I designed it with the intention of using it.’

INFORMATION

‘Daniel Arsham: Objects for Living: Collection II’ runs until 25 September 2021 at Friedman Benda, New York
friedmanbenda.com
danielarsham.com

ADDRESS

515 W 26th Street
New York
NY 10001
USA

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Daniel Arsham loves cars. He also likes eroding stuff. It’s this alluring (yet apocalyptic) combination that gives his latest show, ‘Turning Wrenches’ at Library Street Collective in Detroit, so much fuel. 

Arsham has produced intensely detailed 1:3 scale replicas of supercars and other automotive artefacts as a tribute to the Detroit automotive industry and global car culture. There are also homages to the film industry, where the choice of a character’s vehicle is often an extension of their personality.

The miniature Mustang in the exhibition is a scale replica of the 1968 Ford Mustang GT that Steve McQueen drove during the gripping car chase in the film Bullitt. Elsewhere, a Ferrari references the 1986 comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and a bronze iteration of a DMC DeLorean (the famed time machine in 1985 sci-fi film Back to the Future) take things up a gear. 

The Delorean also speaks to the role of time in Arsham’s work, which nods to a simultaneous past and future. When a car begins to erode, it’s usually an indication of a one-way trip to the scrap heap. And while industrial objects inevitably fall victim to time, Arsham’s approach to decay offers his cars new life, with strategically placed erosions erupting with dazzling masses of crystals.

This show, staged in Library Street Collective’s Snarkitecture-designed space, is an ode to the laborious and culturally rich automobile trade, appetising eye candy for petrolheads, and an exploration of how the fragility of man-made objects can collide with the tenacity of geological material. 

Daniel Arsham on the drive behind his new turbo-charged show

Wallpaper*: What is so exciting about cars, and car culture, and when did this fascination begin?

Daniel Arsham: I’ve had a fascination with cars in general since I was a kid. Cars, to me, have always had an ability to create a sense of time travel. You can get into a perfectly restored car from the 1970s or 1990s, and there’s a very visceral sense of what it felt like to drive in those eras.

I was also drawn to Porschefrom an early age, which led to me eventually purchasing and restoring a 1986 Porsche 911 Turbo. A replica of the restored Porsche, re-interpreted as a 930A, is featured in the exhibition at Library Street Collective as a 1:3 scale replica.

W*: How did you decide which car models to base these sculptures on? 

DA: All of the sculptures on view at Library Street Collective are based on iconic car models. For example, the Ferrari is the car most famously used in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and the DMC DeLorean is famous in its own right for its use in Back to the Future. All of these cars are part of automobile history but also cinematic history. 

The star of the show is the 1968 Ford Mustang GT from Steve McQueen’s movie Bullitt. I worked with the film’s prop master to create a one-to-one scaled model. The final eroded version consists of volcanic ash, pyrite crystal, and white quartz. 

There is also the connection to the history of Detroit, which is inextricably linked to automotive design. John DeLorean was an American car executive who, after leaving General Motors, formed his own company, the DeLorean Motor Company. We also included the Ford Mustang, a Detroit icon introduced in 1964 that revolutionised American cars.

W*: What was the most challenging part of creating this new series?

DA: The most complex piece in the exhibition is the cast of the Ferrari. It’s composed of 35 pieces that all had to be cast individually and then assembled together. Any time you make an object that has an interior and exterior, it becomes much more complex. 

W*: You're a passionate car collector. If you had to choose one car in your collection, which would it be and why?

DA: If I had to choose one car, it would be the 1973 Porsche Carrera 2.7 RS. It’s a legendary car and one I was able to acquire a year and a half ago. It’s truly a ‘supercar’ from that era – it had the largest engine at the time, and driving it is an incredible, visceral experience. It’s also not as insular as modern cars, so you sense every turn, every aspect of the engine, and the transfer of power from the engine to the road.

INFORMATION
Daniel Arsham: ‘Turning Wrenches’, until 7 August 2021, Library Street Collective, Detroit, lscgallery.com
danielarsham.com

ADDRESS

1274 Library St
Detroit, MI 48226

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Samuel Ross of A-COLD-WALL* was one of the first industry leaders to make a concrete commitment in response to the current civil rights movement sweeping the globe, with his grant series announced in early June. Now, Ross has been joined by Daniel Arsham in a further round of grant giving. In the first of their series of joint initiatives, Ross and Arsham have pledged 10 grants totalling £25,000 ($30,000) to support black artists, industrial designers and architects.

‘Beyond my financial support for Black Lives Matter and other organisations, I have been actively looking for additional ways to support Black creatives directly,' Arsham says. ‘Police reform and social justice are just one part of the puzzle towards dismantling systemic racism in the United States. I reached out to Samuel Ross to enquire about his own initiatives in this area. As a result, I have matched the initial $30,000 that A-COLD-WALL* has given to black entrepreneurs for a new round of grants to black artists and architects. This is just one of many initiatives we are pursuing.'

‘Aplicants from West Africa, South Africa, North America and the United Kingdom formed the majority,’ says Ross, who’s DMs filled rapidly as soon as the grants were announced. He explains the works submitted were ‘less outsider art than expected – the majority of applicants are practitioners and well-versed, mature students exhibiting or in proto stages.’ Ross says the grants are essential in bringing recognition to the work of under-represented creatives. ‘The artists selected are exceptionally talented and incredibly proficient within their practises and yet have not accrued the visibility deserved. We need more visibility and collaboration between the arts and design institution and black artists, the design industry must engage.’

The 10 grant recipients selected by Ross and Arsham include Kusheda Mensah (a furniture designer from the UK); Jarret Key (a painter and sculptor from USA); Nifemi Marcus-Bello (an industrial designer from Nigeria); Ronan Mckenzie (a photographer and gallerist from the UK); Limbo Accra (an experimental architect from Ghana); Kumbirai Makumbe (a digital artist from the UK); Jeffrey Meris (a painter and sculptor from USA); Kobby Adi (an installation and photography artist the UK); LUWA (architectural designers from the UK); and Fumani Khumalo (a painter from South Africa).

It took three methodical but urgent days for Ross and Arsham to narrow down the many applicants. ‘Though speed was a focus, the arts and design community need access to such funds now,’ emphasises Ross. What drew him to particular creatives? ‘The works find you – they pull on emotional chords, or offer a rationale; a well-considered solution to a self-researched brief sensitive to local happenings,’ he says. ‘It’s essential to outline where you stand in the midst of a pandemic and civil rights movement – individuals and companies alike. The primary purpose of having a platform is communication – we’re simply utilising the tools we have, moved by the realities at hand,’ says Ross. 

Phillips Asia’s first cross-category online auction blurs the lines between disciplines, for the first time uniting watches, jewellery and art under one umbrella. It made sense to tap into the zeitgeist when it came to relaxing formerly stringent classifications: ‘We have seen a great deal of cross-category collecting, as collectors’ tastes continue to evolve globally,’ says Delissa Handoko, head of online sales.

It is a heady mix – Mikimoto pearls and a rare pink gold Patek Philippe Ref. 5164R-001 are shown with jewels from Cartier and Van Cleef and pieces by Josh Sperling and Katherine Bernhardt, alongside Daniel Arsham’s mischievous Mickey Mouse and Jeff Koons’ balloon dogs. Arsham himself dips between cultures – his blackened stainless steel wristwatch with playful wandering minute and seconds sits alongside last year’s bronze hourglass.

The ‘Refresh: Reload' auction is divided into two parts, with ‘Refresh' a light-hearted edit of contemporary artworks and bright jewels and watches. ‘Reload' dips more towards the avant garde, uniting more progressive pieces with special editions and collectibles. In total, 180 lots are available to view at Phillips Hong Kong.

Collaboration is a key theme, and Daniel Arsham is not the only one to explore other art forms; Kaws and Dior’s figures and Alex Isreal and Rimowa’s luggage are also included here, a testament to the fruitful spirit of new partnerships.

INFORMATION

Bidding closes on 28 May

phillips.com

For almost 15 years, American artist Daniel Arsham has recreated iconic cultural items from the 20th and 21st centuries, inviting audiences to see these commodities anew. Using his signature technique, he’s crystallised everything from Walkman cassette players and Sony headphones to Polaroid cameras, Smeg refrigerators and Nike classics.

Such artefacts are recast and reframed, often presented as partially eroded ‘future relics’ that reflect how our culture might be historicised by generations to come. For his current exhibition at Galerie Perrotin in Paris, however, Arsham has stepped back even further into history, leaving behind current and recent cultural movements in favour of those from the 7th century BC up until the early 1800s.

‘The idea to work with sculptures from classical antiquity came two years ago when I was in Paris preparing for a project with a museum,’ the New York-based artist explains. ‘I have always been interested in the way that objects move through time, but this is the first time I’m working with classical and ancient objects.’ To that end, the exhibition at Perrotin includes a series of large-scale busts, friezes and sculptures cast from the originals.

We see Michelangelo’s Moses rendered in blue calcite and hydrostone, eroding near his thighs, chest and head. Alexandros of Antioch’s Venus de Milo, realised in white calcite, hews closely to the original – albeit with areas of her head, torso and right knee apparently weathering away. To create these works, Arsham was granted unprecedented access to the Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais (RMN), a 200-year-old moulding studio that reproduces masterpieces for several major museums throughout Europe.

‘The RMN has a selection which includes thousands of moulds of works from antiquity to the Renaissance to neoclassical works,’ says the artist. Arsham sorted through these moulds and selected pieces to reform, a decision often based on two things: ‘one, the kind of historical context around some of these pieces and, two, around the works that were most visually iconic’. Finally, he ensured the pieces would work with his process, which involved recreating them in crystal, volcanic ash and ‘other materials that we associate with the geological time scale’.

The sculptures are presented on pristine plinths, illuminated from underneath by white fluorescent light. Sleek and cool, they are a stark reminder of where we’re standing: not in the Louvre or Acropolis Museum or the Kunsthistorisches Museum, but rather in a contemporary art gallery. The works here could easily be from the past, present or future, a confusion of time that is inherent to Arsham’s work. And just because the source material has changed doesn’t mean his artistic approach has become any different.

‘In general, I like try to create scenarios that allow these works to float in time,’ adds the artist. ‘I treated these [ancient] objects the same way that I would treat an Apple computer or a Jordan sneaker – objects that we associate with a particular era in history. And therefore, these objects can become useful in my project to confuse that history.’

Looking forward, we can expect to see more from the past. ‘I certainly will be engaging further with many of these objects,’ Arsham says. ‘There's a vast trove of moulds of these works that I now have access to, and the project is just beginning.’

INFORMATION

‘Paris, 3020’, 11 January – 21 March, Perrotin. perrotin.com; danielarsham.com

ADDRESS

Perrotin
76 rue de Turenne
75003 Paris

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Watch Maison et Objet Designer of the Year Michael Anastassiades tour us through his practice

It’s a new decade, but true to form, Paris’ winter cultural offerings roll on in. While the deep dive of Charlotte Perriand’s work stays strong at Foundation Louis Vuitton and fashion troops flocked in for menswear A/W, three new solo shows empower the limelight. Virgil Abloh brings street culture to Galerie Kreo, Herve Van der Straeten invites us onto his fun ride and Daniel Arsham takes us to 3020 at Galerie Perrotin in an exploration of historic sculpture. Inside the Maison et Objet (17-21 January) halls, Michael Anastassides presents his refined mobile lighting, while fresh talent on the French design scene get in the frame.

Explore our highlights from Maison et Objet and beyond

Fun Ride by Hervé Van der Straeten

Over in the Marais district, the French artist-designer brings the whimsical essence of funfairs to his tenth solo show. Zappy (pictured) and Looping are among the names of the new consoles that will entertain viewers – products in lacquered wood and bronze. 35 pieces in total come together in Van der Straeten’s pleasure ground, including the Spider cabinet and Crystalline chandelier, and for added play, he shares the dialogue with the interdisciplinary work of artist duo Arotin & Serghei too – extending the visual treat through colour and light.

Rising Talents Awards

The gaze remains on home turf for the January 2020 edition of the Rising Talents Awards, as six French emerging names, Wendy Andreu, Mathieu Peyroulet Ghilini, Laureline Galliot, Julie Richoz, Adrien Garci (pictured) and Natacha & Sasha, have been chosen by a jury that includes Pierre Charpin, Didier Krzentowski, Guillaume Houzé, Pierre Yovanovitch, René-Jacques Mayer and Françoise Seince. True to the Parisian spirit, many of the designers have had a stint at local institution ENSCI Les Ateliers, while an eclectic range of techniques filter through the work, including cartoon software, hand craft, laser cutting and ecological solutions.

Trame

It may be cooler climes, but new brand Trame is sending us energy from the Mediterranean with its launch of homeware and accessories created with historic stories in mind. The first range travels to Morocco, with hand crafted pieces inspired by stories of Madame de Blois, King Louis XIV’s favourite daughter. Italian designer Maddalena Casadei, London and Warsaw-based Maria Jeglinska and Julie Richoz from Paris have devised this inaugural collection, titled ‘A voyage to Meknes,’ that includes ceramics, rugs, curtains and blankets that are embedded with the artisanal culture of Morocco. Milan-based Studio Vedet have been tapped for the brand’s art director, and the collection will also travel to Salone del Mobile later in the year.

Michael Anastassiades Designer of the Year 2020

One of our shortlisted Designers of the Year, London-based Anastassiades goes full circle for Maison et Objet – the location where he first showed wares from his eponymous studio back in 2007. Over ten years on, he has been very busy, and 2019 marked his first retrospective in his home country of Cyprus. For this special showcase, he brings together all 16 of his Mobile Chandeliers (including some new iterations) with the poetic mastery his studio has become known for. ‘For me, it is important to always show something different, make sure that what I design explores a new idea.’

‘Efflorescence’ by Virgil Abloh at Galerie Kreo

Following two major design launches with both Vitra and Carpenters Workshop Gallery last year, Abloh has been tapped by Galerie Kreo for a street culture range. Architectural concrete forms have been emblazoned with the Chicago-born creative’s graffiti in a merging of eras, from brutalism to street culture. Read more here.

INFORMATION
maison-objet.com

Forty years on from opening its first store, The Hour Glass business has expanded across Southeast Asia to Japan and Australia but more than that, the Singapore watch emporium has had an influence on the region’s tastes and buying habits that few stores could match.

The Hour Glass was an early champion of independent watchmakers such as Urwerk and de Bethune and became the first port of call for both collectors and emerging brands – too many to list, but NOMOS Glashütte and MB&F are just two that have made their debut in Singapore at The Hour Glass.

To mark the anniversary (and there’s no business more obsessed by them than the watch industry), Michael Tay, the group MD, worked with Sir David Adjaye and the watch auctioneer Aurel Bacs to put together a horological exhibition, ‘Then, Now and Beyond’.

Daniel Arsham, Marc Newson, Nendo, and Studio Wieki Somers have all created works for the exhibition which will be shown alongside specially commissioned watches from Audemars Piguet, Chopard, De Bethune, Franck Muller, MB&F, NOMOS Glashütte, Sinn, TAG Heuer, Urwerk and Ulysse Nardin.

It’s an eclectic mix, with Daniel Arsham re-interpreting the hourglass and Nendo’s Oki Sato showing a cuboid monolithic clock. Wallpaper* Handmade collaborators, Studio Wieki Somers, have produced the ‘Beetle Clock’, a proxy for the global decline in insect numbers and species.

Marc Newson, whose history in watch design goes back to the Nineties, has produced a thoroughly modern take on the klepsydra, the water-clock idea that dates back to the earliest known civilisations.

Milan-based design studio JoAnn Tan Studio, who specialise in window displays, installations, scenography and set design, were brought in to create a look and feel for the exhibition which will be at The Hour Glass’ Napoleonic-themed Malmaison concept store on Singapore’s Orchard Road in Singapore until the end of February

INFORMATION

thehourglass.com 

I think people were surprised when they saw that my house is not this totally all-white concrete box’, Daniel Arsham remarks. The New York-based multimedia artist lives with his family on Long Island, in a 1969 modernist home designed by Norman Jaffe. For the house that Arsham describes as ‘all cedar and stone,’ he developed pieces of furniture that he did not originally intend to show. ‘Marc Benda (co-founder of Friedman Benda) happened to see it,’ Arsham says, ‘and thought it might be interesting to show the public this other aspect of my practice.’

At this year’s Design Miami, Friedman Benda presents the result of these sculptural explorations in an installation that fictionalises a domestic setting partly conceived as a kunstkammer.

The works ‘often relate to shapes that would contrast with the rigidity of the house,’ explains Arsham. ‘Jaffe brought in curves in his later career and ran away from these early, more modernist right-angle approach. The furniture was made in contrast to that.’

Arsham’s Cleveland Chair I, Paris Chaise Lounge I and Shanghai Chair drive that idea home. The latter piece fits the artist’s recognisable achromatic aesthetic of fossilised future relics, while the former two introduce a new vocabulary of form and tonality.

‘A lot of it is made out of canvases that we used in the studio, which are dyed in various colors. Whenever we do sculptural works, I often draw notes onto the sculptures that define where the erosion will be placed on them,’ says Arsham. ‘I’ve appreciated separately some of these drawings and decided to place them onto the furniture objects, as if they will be turned into later sculptural cast works.’

Other aspects of the artist’s newfound Long Island setting seep into the objects on show at Friedman Benda’s Design Miami booth. Arsham’s Pasadena Sea Glass Lamp, for instance, merges his concept of fictional archeology with technological references informed by the artist’s on-going project at NASA JPL in Pasadena. ‘At the house where I live, there’s a beach,’ Arsham explains. ‘I found a lot of sea glass on the beach, fragments of text from a bottle and things like that. So, I combined this idea that glass shards and some giant piece of NASA machinery or spacecraft would land in the future and tumble into this object, almost like a tumbled piece of glass from the future.’ §

INFORMATION

Daniel Arsham for Friedman Benda will be on view at Design Miami from 3-8 December

friedmanbenda.com

At Selfridges in London, the three-month long Future Fantasy campaign is going through a lunar phase, and it looks like there's new moon on the horizon.

New York-based artist Daniel Arsham has teamed up with the London department store on ‘The House by Daniel Arsham’ – an installation that contains a series of limited-edition pieces, each questioning the reality of how familiar products of today might look like if they were rediscovered in the future.

One of our favourites is the Bang & Olufsen Beoplay A9 speaker, which uses the image of a blue moon derived from Arsham’s original bubble-textured oil painting and his fascination with outer space. Well rounded in shape, as well as sound, Bang & Olufsen’s familiar trio legs are revamped in white stained oak, while an anodised aluminium ring serves as a literal silver lining.

Other brand collaborations include a seven-piece ready-to-wear collection with A-Cold-Wall*; a Rimowa x Daniel Arsham Eroded Attache and even an Arsham-adapted tin of Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup. Each object ties into The House concept situated on the ground floor, where visitors can explore Arsham's pieces placed in the familar settings of a front yard, kitchen, living and office space.

Widely recognised as one of the most powerful home speakers, Active Room Compensation provides haptic feedback, optimising sound performance depending on the speakers surroundings. Additionally, seven full range drivers pack a punch, providing an impressive soundscape in every room of the house.

Google Assistant is on hand (or rather, off) to control the speaker by the users voice, while physical hand gestures across the surface of the speaker have the capacity to change volume, skip, play and pause.

INFORMATION
bang-olufsen.com

danielarsham.com

selfridges.com

Israel’s Design Museum Holon has just opened its doors to ‘The Conversation Show’, an exhibition that explores five creative relationships at the root of five global design studios. In this intimate investigation, the role of the curator, Maria Cristina Didero, has been particularly analytical, and the works on display are the outcome of creative processes that transcend the fundamentals of conventional product design.

‘The show is based on emotions and interaction,’ says Didero. ‘It is an exhibition focusing on the idea of reciprocity and exchange, investigating true and deep bonds of designers who think and work in perfect unison, as well as the creative results of their distinctive approach.’

Five distinguished design firms were chosen for the project: Amsterdam-based cooperative BCXSY (Boaz Cohen and Sayaka Yamamoto); Vienna-based studio mischer’traxler (Katharina Mischer and Thomas Traxler); Jaffa-based studio Reddish (Naama Steinbock and Idan Friedman); New York-based multidisciplinary practice Snarkitecture (Daniel Arsham, Alex Mustonen and Benjamin Porto) and Venice-based studio Zaven (Enrica Cavarzan and Marco Zavagno).

The behaviour of communication within collaboration creates an intimate portait in the show. ‘This is a very important exhibition, and is particularly close to my heart because, more than any other show I have curated, it is really centred around people, their creative processes – on collaboration, listening and sharing in order to produce design. It is also very significant that this project, which is based on people and talks about people and relationships, should take place in a country as unique as Israel,’ Didero explains.

The creative processes of these five selected studios are all based on the idea of beauty and innovation, and reveal a sense of accessibility to their design language that might have not been available before. ‘I would like to thank all the designers who have worked with me on this show for being so open, generous and curious – for revealing themselves to us,’ says Didero. ‘At the end of the day that was the biggest challenge. They did not give up when asked: “how do you start a project? How do you develop it? Who are you, how do you think? How could you explain your creative process to the public?”’

Using mirrors designed for Gufram, Snarkitecture creates an immersive installation that alters the monochromatic architectural surrounds, transforming the space into its vision of a parallel universe. Titled, The Hall of Broken Mirrors, it was designed for the museum’s Lower Gallery, while the other four projects are situated in the Upper Gallery of the building designed by Ron Arad in 2010.

Elsewhere, Mischer’traxler realises a kinetic light installation entitled Coalesque that visualises the couple’s conversations, while Reddish concentrates on the idea of equilibrium and synergy with Balancing Act – a collection of mobile objects that interact both with each other and the visitors. Zaven mixes light and colour in Dune, a collection of lamps made fused glass sheets that are the result of the designers’ experimentation with traditional Venetian craft techniques.

Finally, duo BCXSY’s project examines the concept of balance as the starting point for every creative process and their site-specific piece, titled Reciprocal Syntax, can only be activated by two participants working together.

Go behind the scenes with BCXSY and their collaborative process

INFORMATION

‘The Conversation Show’ is on view until 26 October. For more information, visit the Design Museum of Holon website

ADDRESS

Pinkhas Eilon St 8, Holon
5845400
Israel

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The futuristic, dystopian world that the New York-based artist Daniel Arsham has created during the course of his career takes a new form with the release of his collaboration with the boutique fragrance and design studio Joya, this week.

The limited-edition object – a slip-cast porcelain exoplanet, inspired by Arsham’s time spent at the Jet Propulsion Lab of NASA (where much of the focus is on searching for these 3,500 moons or planets that orbit around a star outside of our solar system) – is actually a candle in deconstructed form. Comprised of two planetary halves that can be stored as a whole, the avant-garde sculpture requires its owner to insert a cotton wick into the base and fill it up with an accompanying canister of scented soy wax beads for use.

Fragrance-wise, Arsham’s scent is actually something Joya had originally designed and produced for exclusive use within his studio and during international exhibitions.

‘Daniel came to us years ago in search of a signature scent to complement his exhibitions and projects – a unifying, experiential element that could connect to his practice and studio,’ recalls Joya’s founder Frederick Bouchardy. ‘This scent has been around (albeit invisibly) at his exhibitions globally for awhile.’

Essentially a fig-based construction – a preference of Arsham’s, the perfume brings together modern, herbaceous top notes, a heart of jasmine and sweet milky aldehydes that evoke a creamy coconut, and a velvet-like drydown that leaves behind a trail of woody amber.

We layered musk and citrus on top of and under these to make everything seamless, so it might blend into the background, but also be present and inspiring, clean and ethereal,’ adds Bouchardy.

In total, the set reflects Arsham’s longtime fascination with the universe and space, while also alluding to the many processes he’s experimented with at his studio. While a visit to Arsham’s studio might be limited to only a select few, perfuming your space in its likeness is now entirely in the realm of possibility. 

INFORMATION

For more information, visit Daniel Arsham’s website and the Joya Studio website

Established by architect Alex Mustonen and artist Daniel Arsham in 2008, New York design studio Snarkitecture occupies an enthralling grey area between the worlds of art and architecture. In the relatively short space of ten years, its founders’ unique talent for turning the ordinary into the extraordinary has seen the practice rack up an impressive list of clients across the globe, including collaborations with COS, Kith, Valextra, Calvin Klein and Adidas to name just a few.

As it continues to expand, Mustonen and Arsham, together with partner Benjamin Porto, agreed that now seemed like the perfect time to debut its a monograph.

‘It felt like a good time to start framing our work,’ reflects Mustonen. ‘When you’re in amongst it, it becomes your day to day and it can become difficult to take a step back and reassess, or take a critical view. This exercise really helped us do that.’

Published by Phaidon, the tome showcases 70 projects from Snarkitecture’s mostly monochrome portfolio and explores how its experimental and multidisciplinary approach has turned them into one of the world’s most sought-after design studios.

‘It started as an experiment,’ explains Mustonen. ‘There wasn’t any set agenda or business plan apart from the basic conceptual framework, which was that right from the beginning our goal was to create a collaboration between the disciplines of art and architecture. To come up with these outlandish experiential concepts and then find ways of bringing them into the world.’

From product and furniture design to interiors and large-scale installations, the book’s 400 visuals document projects such as the firm’s design for the Design Miami collectors fair tent, which it clad in white sausage-shaped inflatables; a cave-like space made from excavating blocks of Styrofoam for the Storefront for Art & Architecture; and the very Instagram-friendly ‘beach’ installation at the National Building Museum in Washington DC, where the studio filled the grand hall with almost a million translucent balls to create a ‘sea’ in which visitors could frolic.

Milan-based curator Maria Cristina Didero provides the book’s introduction, a conversation among Mustonen, Arsham and Benjamin Porto which provides insight into the thought processes behind their creative methods. For detail fans, the book’s ‘Technical Index’ features architectural drawings of every project. Some may also recognise the book’s topographical torn paper cover design, which the studio debuted as a wallpaper with Brooklyn brand Calico last year. Photography is by Noah Kalina, while Neil Donnelly created the book’s design.

‘We chose a fairly unorthodox structure for the book,’ explains Mustonen. ‘Instead of grouping projects by theme we used an open-ended spectrum such as “not art” and “not architecture” as all of our work falls in between those spaces. It was helpful for us to think about the projects on this linear spectrum.’

Looking to the future, Mustonen revealed the studio has some permanent as well as large-scale works in its sights, the first of which will be unveiled at Salone del Mobile (17-22 April). Working in collaboration with quartz surface manufacturer Caesarstone, Snarkitecture will present a large-scale installation titled ‘Altered States’, that promises to explores the changing states of water in the context of the modern kitchen.

INFORMATION

Snarkitecture, £49.95, published by Phaidon. For more information, visit the Snarkitecture website

Following in quick succession of his first colour-drenched foray at Galerie Perrotin in New York last autumn, Daniel Arsham has transformed the High Museum of Art in Atlanta with three site-specific installations. The exhibition, entitled ‘Daniel Arsham: Hourglass’ continues the artist’s commentary on how we view history through the exploration of physical artefacts. In the case of contemporary times, these artefacts take the form of sporting memorabilia, boom boxes, keyboards and others such.

At the High Museum, Arsham combines audio, sculpture, architecture and performance in the creation of his trio of interrelated environments. In the lobby, performers routinely turn a display of oversized hourglasses to reveal everyday objects, which Arsham has cast in precious and semi precious stones. Finely crushed crystals serve as sand that run through each vessel to reveal and conceal the sculptures within. In the background, audio of a child’s voice describing the objects being unearthed is piped through the hall.

Upstairs, Arsham has created an intricate Japanese Zen garden, rendered in monochromatic blue and completed by a pagoda, petrified trees, tatami mats and delicately raked sand. Dyed rice paper and wooden joinery adorn the walls to complete the sense of timelessness in the room. This tone is continued by a performer, donning traditional robes, raking prescribed patterns into the sand, while a voice overhead describes the environment.

In contrast, the gallery adjacent to the Japanese garden is a cavernous setting festooned with sculptures of contemporary sports equipment, such as footballs, basketballs and baseballs, all cast in purple amethyst – a work reminiscent of the installation at Galerie Perrotin in New York. 

These vibrant bursts of colour can be attributed to Arsham’s use of special lenses to correct his colour blindness – one of the reasons why his earlier work was largely confined to a palette of grey tones.

‘Life is definitely more nuanced, but I’m not sure it’s more interesting. I feel like I’m inside a game – an overly saturated world,’ says Arsham. ‘But now I’ve arrived at a point where I’m using colour as another tool in my work. This is a unique project for me in that there is a ton of color, so I think it’s going to be really interesting to see audiences react.’

‘Daniel Arsham: Hourglass’ coincides with two upcoming collaborations between Arsham and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (ASO). As the Woodruff Arts Center’s 2016–17 Phil Kent Creative Fellow, Arsham will partner with the ASO to design stage environments for Christopher Theofanidis’ commission Creation/Creator and Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera Orfeo et Euridice. The former will be staged in Atlanta later this month, while Orfeo et Euridice will take place in May.

INFORMATION

‘Daniel Arsham: Hourglass’ is on view until 21 May. For more information, visit the High Museum of Art website

ADDRESS

High Museum of Art
1280 Peachtree St NE
Atlanta, GA 3030

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Daniel Arsham, artist and one half of design duo Snarkitecture, has recently collaborated with the musician Pharrell Williams and the actor James Franco. That would suggest a number of things, not all of them good (he has also collaborated with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, following in the footsteps of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, just by the way of other credentials). What it strongly suggests is that Arsham is having a moment.

London is proving especially receptive. Arsham screened 'Future Relic 02', his short film starring Franco as a sort of anti-archeologist of the future, at Chiltern Firehouse earlier this week; he is one of the artists featured in the just opened 'Post Pop: East Meets West' at the Saatchi Gallery; and the Pippy Houldsworth Gallery has given over its Heddon Street space to a single new installation by Arsham, entitled 'Bound Figure'.

Arsham often plays with expectations about what materials and the built environment should and shouldn't do. And in 'Bound Figure' we see a human form, a man looking at the shoes, shrouded in the gallery's white wall, trapped in the white cube; possibly forcing their way out, possibly being sucked in, possibly dreaming the whole thing up. More than a straight visual gag, it is expertly executed (the white wall becomes a white sheet convincingly) and unnerving.

Arsham soon moves onto Miami, where he was born, for a solo show at Locust Projects to coincide with Art Basel Miami.

ADDRESS

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery
6 Heddon Street
London W1B 4BT

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In 1996, when Wallpaper* was born, a teenage Daniel Arsham was, he recalls, busy ‘listening to hip hop and taking a lot of photos on a Pentax K1000’. Two decades on, his witty experiments with structures encompass architecture, art and performance spaces. He is co-founder of the art/architecture studio Snarkitecture, while his works in sculpture and in set design for leading contemporary dancers have been shown around the world. ‘I’ve exhibited and worked in Japan for years,’ he says. ‘My wife is half Japanese. It’s my favourite place on earth. One of my favourite dishes from Japan is cold soba. The summers there can be quite hot and this dish is served cold. I like to make it even colder.’ After rinsing cooked soba noodles in cold water and placing them in the freezer, he serves them in a bamboo basket above a bowl of dry ice in hot water so the fog from the ice envelopes them. He garnishes his noodles with green onions, shiso leaves and nori, and dips them in mentsuyu sauce.

Ingredients
Soba noodles
Bamboo basket, for serving
Dry ice, for serving
Green onion
Shiso leaves
Nori
Mentsuyu sauce

Method
Cook noodles in boiling water and strain as instructed. Rinse in cold water to cool, and place in freezer to further chill. Garnish with chopped green onions, shiso leaves and nori, and serve with mentsuyu sauce for dipping. For added drama, serve in a bamboo basked above a bowl of dry ice in hot water.

As originally featured in the October 2016 issue of Wallpaper* (W*211)

INFORMATION

Photography: John Short. Interiors: Matthew Morris. Food: Jennifer Joyce

Multi-disciplinary art-star Daniel Arsham is known for looking forwards. The Snarkitecture co-founder has a questioning, futuristic tone, that recurrs in whatever medium he’s picked that day – be it film, sculpture, paint or performance art. His new exhibition at Tokyo’s Nunzuka Gallery continues this probing theme through nine time-travelling works.

’My First Exhibition in Japan, Year 2044’ takes ageing media devices like boom-boxes and analogue cameras, and decays them in geological materials such as volcanic ash, selenite and crushed glass. Displayed with museum-like sterility, complete with holes, broken ariels and melted lenses, the objects are made alien, as if they’ve been excavated from a future archaeological dig.

We’ve seen Arsham destroy cameras before, back in 2012, where he plaster-cast them, then smashed them for ’Reach Ruin’ in Philadelphia. They appear again amongst the chalky rubble of his ’fictional archeology’ show in October 2015. These new sculptures have a darker, more sinister tone. The same intricate detail and satirical wit remains in their decay, but the smooth, ice-white plaster has been replaced by black tar and grainy ash.

Upping the stakes, Arsham has also fabricated a human body, preserved in a lava-like substance, with singed holes in the life-like skin. Protruding from the wall, trapped in stasis, the sculpture is reminiscent of the body casts at Pompeii. Eerily, only the face, arms and legs remain, with the feet still tucked in boots. 

A little light is added to this prophetic showcase through four vibrant paintings of the moon, which use thick blue oils to create the bubbling crater-effect. Arsham’s film ’Future Relic’ also has a lunar theme, the last three chapters of which are on display. Posing as a potential future documentary, the film imagines a post-apocalyptic world in which large, geometric sections of the moon are excavated in an attempt to reverse the rising tides.

By citing the year ’2044’ in the title, Arsham creates a sense of urgency, hinting that this desolate land of ash clouds and heaving tides might not be so far away.

INFORMATION
’My First Exhibition in Japan, Year 2044’ runs through 16 April 2016. For more information, visit the Nanzuka Gallery website

ADDRESS

Shibuya Ibis #B1F
2-17-3 Shibuya Shibuya-ku 
Tokyo 150-0002, Japan

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Photography courtesy the artist and Nanzuka Gallery

Artist and designer Daniel Arsham – co-founder of the trailblazing Brooklyn firm Snarkitecture and responsible for such innovative immersive art-cum-architectural projects as 'The Beach' – has just completed an exhibition that further showcases his considerable creative talents. Art enthusiasts are already embracing 'The Future Was Written', staged at the Miami Design District’s YoungArts Gallery and curated by no less than the recently appointed Miami Pérez Art Museum Miami director, Franklin Sirmans.

Arsham’s efforts fall into the categories of sculpture, architecture and performance, making for an immersive and continually evolving experience; it's ‘fictional archeology’, he says, rationalising the thrust of the show.

Within the gallery, Arsham has placed some 2,000 chalk casts of works as disparate as film reels, Leica cameras and computers which he defines as ‘relics of the past’. Among them are casts of Grecian-style hands and regal heads, along with an electric guitar or two, all which are placed on a bevy of pedestals, with some strewn across the floor with black painted chalkboards cloaking the walls. 

As to the transformative and participatory nature of the exhibition, gallery goers are invited to take up those chalky objects to create their own drawings throughout the two story space. Within hours of the preview party, upwards of hundreds of designs marked the gallery walls –a newly found public creativity galvanised under Arsham's fanciful influence.

INFORMATION

‘The Future Was Written’ is on view until 15 December

ADDRESS

YoungArts Gallery
2100 Biscayne Boulevard
Miami, FLA 33137

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Visitors to Art Basel in Miami this week didn’t have to walk much beyond the entrance to get the message that the fair was taking its art seriously. On the left, at Helly Nahmad’s booth, an enormous black Alexander Calder mobile, 'Rouge Triomphant' (1959 -1962), was elegantly housed in its own white space – a spectacular piece with an equally spectacular $35million price tag.

Straight ahead, at Galerie Gmurzynska, a $1million Picasso fresco was attracting attention. The Swiss gallery, celebrating 50 years in the business, had brought in Baz Luhrmann (much in evidence, and looking joyfully younger as the years go by) to curate its birthday exhibition. The Australian director had made some classy choices, including a delicate Yves Klein 1961 fire painting where the trace left on the paper had an almost Brâncuși-like form.

After these grand gestures, the fair returned swiftly to the present day. At Sadie Coles, a ceiling installation comprising 1080 plaster 'raindrops' by Urs Fischer filled the booth with drops of colour graduating from green to yellow. At Gavin Brown Enterprises, eight garish paintings by the ever-eager-to-shock Bjarne Melgaard – all punkish voodoo faces and big dicks – had sold in the show’s opening hours at $45,000 a pop. (Melgaard had gone and spent a share of the profits at the Mr Nobody and Mr Somebody pop-up store in the Design District where fashion designer Bernhard Wilhelm’s back catalogue was on sale.)

Meanwhile, Swiss gallery Hauser & Wirth made a tactical nod to North America, where it will open a dazzling new space in Los Angeles sometime next year. 'We’re showing America at its finest,' said Iwan Wirth, of Los Angeles artists Diana Thater and Mark Bradford, while Paul McCarthy’s 'White Snow, Bambi' eclipsed the lot – a three-metre high tangle of pigs heads, hooves and human faces telling a hallucinatory X-rated fairy tale.

Over at Kavi Gupta Gallery, one of Mickalene Thomas’ fanatically detailed 1970s room sets was functioning as an artwork/resting place for tired visitors. 'Bringing this to Miami was a labour of love,' said Gupta surveying the scene. Thomas’ mission is to tell the story of Black America, and to freeze frame the minutiae of daily life. These included a pair of Crocs in highly polished cast bronze – quite possibly the first time that this footwear has looked even vaguely desirable.

ADDRESS

Miami Beach Convention Center
1901 Convention Center Drive
Miami Beach

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Re-branding an existing hotel is no easy feat, but the challenge didn't seem too much for Andre Balazs' golden touch. Since acquiring the Cooper Square Hotel over two years ago, the hotelier has been steadily giving the 21-storey building the Standard treatment - all the while receiving guests, no less. The now-complete Standard East Village boasts a creative rejig of its existing infrastructure and is the more contemplative, laid back cousin to its High Line counterpart. Designed in part by Shawn Hausman, guests now enter the eclectic lobby through the cosy doors of an adjoining townhouse. A spherical, grey-scale installation, Pixel Cloud, by Snarkitecture's Daniel Arsham, emerges through an adjacent corridor. The space leads off into Café Standard, an intimate street café decorated with colourful tiles and hanging plants that dishes out casual American fare, cocktails and beer, and boasts doors that open onto the street during warmer, al fresco-friendly months. The hotel's real jewel though, is Narcissa, a Cali-inspired restaurant, and the latest enterprise from chef John Fraser, which uses produce grown on Balazs' farm, Locusts on Hudson, and champions rotisserie cooking in a whole new way. The Nordic-Shaker style dining room overlooks the hotel's expansive garden, which houses a ceramic fountain installation by artists Chris Johanson and Jo Jackson and will also offer a petanque court and lounge chairs as soon as the weather permits.

INFORMATION

Website

ADDRESS

The Standard East Village 

25 Cooper Square 

New York

USA

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Glimpses of a ghostly, monochrome world are what mark out Daniel Arsham. The New York-based artist, and co-founder of experimental design and architecture practice Snarkitecture, has long been moulding his own blend of art, performance and architecture in a hypnotic greyscale palette, which has never veered off-course – that is, until now.

This month, Arsham’s first solo exhibition takes place at the New York branch of Galerie Perrotin, which has represented him for the past 11 years. The exhibition brings together ten sculptural works, as well as an immersive, large-scale installation that takes over the gallery’s entire basement floor – and for the first time is in colour.

‘For the last few years, I have been working with these fictional archaeological objects from our present that have been recreated in materials that we associate with time,’ Arsham says. ‘All of the materials have been in a tonality of black and white. Partly that was due to the colouration of the actual materials, but also I’m colour blind, so most of the work I’ve made has been in that scope.’

He continues, ‘I recently got lenses that partially correct my vision. Now that I’m able to see properly, this exhibition further explores the themes that I’ve been working with, but does it with a palette of colour.’

Arsham’s new work expands upon his role as a historian of contemporary culture, recovering abstracted icons of 20th century living. The exhibition replaces the crumbling boomboxes, video game controllers, motorcycle helmets and cameras that Arsham has conjured up in past work, with symbols of sports culture, such as baseball caps, varsity jackets, protective masks and vests, basketballs and footballs made with rich blue calcite crystal and vibrant purple amethyst.

‘Even though I can see a fuller range of colour now, I’m not just making a rainbow. My vision is actually not that reduced. If you see 100 per cent of colour, I see about 20 per cent of the range, so it’s not entirely black and white,’ Arsham explains. ‘The colour in the exhibition comes from the materials themselves. I’m still using some of the reductive palette that I’ve used in my work in the past, which is a simplification of things.’ Arsham’s fascination with turning everyday objects into mysterious and curious artefacts is a mission that continues to define his practice. ‘I’ve looked for things that are icons of themselves. Things that are immediately recognisable, not just to me and to Western culture, but worldwide,’ he says. The crystalline effect of the materials – and the fact that Arsham doesn’t repair the failings of the casting process – produces a frozen yet imperfect portrait of contemporary life that leaves the viewer with a dissociative take on today’s pop culture.

‘I have always been interested in architecture and time. I’ve done a lot of work in which I’ve explored archeology and objects, but I’ve never explored the fictional archeologist, if you will. This exhibition sort of hints at this character,’ he adds.

That character is most apparent in Arsham’s installation of amethyst basketballs, which takes over the gallery’s basement like some obsessive collector’s cavern. Realised in varying shades of violet, the balls, which vary in size, are cast from crushed crystals and compressed into moulds to great visual effect. ‘There are no rules on how to cast volcanic ash or crystal into these shapes, so the framework of that was really based on casting techniques that have existed for hundreds of years,’ he says. ‘They are quite rudimentary processes that I’ve then further developed and expanded on.’

As for the choices of blue and purple for his first foray into colour, Arsham says, ‘The final materials happened to be the first ones that really worked for me. But I did play around with jade and different types of selenite crystal. I also have a wide range of other crystals in various colours that we will do something with at some point.’ So watch this space.

As originally featured in the October 2016 issue of Wallpaper* (W*211)

INFORMATION
Daniel Arsham’s ‘Circa 2345’ is on view from 15 September – 22 October. For more information, visit the Galerie Perrotin website

ADDRESS

Galerie Perrotin
909 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10021

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For someone who has built his music career on a steady stream of strong collaborations, Pharrell Williams already had a head start on easing into the role of art curator. And it should come as no surprise that the ensuing group show emerges as a general remix of Pop art and its au courant successors - although within a setting overseen by globally-based gallery owner Emmanuel Perrotin, you can be sure that any exploration of post-Pop will be as provoking as it is playful.

Titled GIRL, a nod to the former Wallpaper* Design Awards judge's most recent album, the exhibition inaugurates Perrotin's new Paris space, the Salle de Bal, a 700 sq m annex located in a 17th century Hotel Particulier down the street from his original gallery in the Marais.

In an early walkthrough of the show on Saturday, co-curator Ashok Adicéam said the project came together in roughly 60 days, with Williams constantly weighing in on the selection and flow of the show. 'Pharrell is popular and he is into popular art. Most of the artists - not all - are pop. And there's a capacity [among] these artists to do this reversal of pop culture itself and within a thematic on the image of women. So I think that works well when it comes to the way Pharrell sees things.'

During a press conference, Williams suggested that the show should be labeled 'An education of Pharrell Williams' and said the collaborative process is like a 'crash course' into artists' lives.

Just don't expect to see the multi-hyphenate taking up painting or collage anytime soon. Positioned in front of Guy Limone's GIRL (a riff on William's album cover in which the length of the tiny female figurines, when lined up, would equal the average height of a French woman), he told journalists, 'I only do things that I feel ambitious about or feel I could bring something too… and I really just get such a kick out of watching other artists do what they do. It's nice to be on the receiving end.'

In fact, Williams did a lot more than watch as pal Daniel Arsham conceived The Future Pharrell in his signature medium, broken glass. As part of the process for creating the life-size cast, Pharrell found himself breathing through a straw, his face covered in plaster.

Among the 37 artists featured, 16 are women and several of their works can be found in the final room of the show's sequence; no XY-chromosome artists allowed. On one wall, Agnès Thurnauer's appropriation of Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du Monde (in this case, the nude pelvis is overlaid with feminized names of famous artists - think 'Pietra Mondrian' and 'Jacqueline Pollock'); on another, Sophie Calle's personal account of her late puberty.

Williams fielded no shortage of questions about the depiction of nudity and idealized beauty in his videos vis-à-vis the depiction of women in the show. 'What we were trying to accomplish with this project was to house many different facets, many different perspectives of women,' Williams explained. 'We want these works to be curious and spark conversation - not controversy - conversation. Without conversation, there is no conversion. And with no conversion, there's no conviction.'

Adicéam pointed out that 12 artists, including Takashi Murakami (who used Williams' wedding photos by Terry Richardson), Kaws and Laurent Grasso, made works in homage to Williams - and that most of them had pre-existing friendships. Rob Pruitt's Studio Loveseat began with both artists applying magic markers to an Ikea sofa and ended as a pastiche of Pharrell's visual universe. 'He has this great capacity of listening and learning,' said Adicéam of Williams. 'He makes fellow artists - the ones he works with - very comfortable; well, he makes you feel like a star. From there, there are good vibrations. And what comes out from that is always singular.'

When the show ends on 25 June, the two custom-painted bathrooms by Jean-Michel Othoniel and Pierre Le-Tan will remain permanent features, thankfully.  When asked which work he would choose as a hypothetical souvenir, Williams paused before replying, 'I just want to move my family in and just live in here. Each piece is just as important. It would be quite the home. It is quite the home.'

ADDRESS

Salle de Bal
Galerie Perrotin
Paris

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Inflatable Swiss chalets, huge easter eggs and bare-breasted women beating resin blocks in a public park. It's the first week of December, and once again in Miami, the art fair has come to town, with this year activities neatly bookended in the north of the city by a show at MOCA of Tracey Emin's neon works - 67 created over 20 years - called Angel Without You and in the south by a retrospective exhibition of Ai Weiwei's work at the newly opened, Herzog & de Meuron-designed Pérez Art Museum.

Emin's archive of chaotically scrawled and spelt slogans - in a lofty blacked-out space - read like illuminated scribblings on a toilet wall. From inanities such as 'Is Legal Sex Anal?' and 'Is Anal Sex Legal?', to moments of beauty ('Love happens - like lightning') and self-knowledge ('I know, I know, I know' - crossed out three times), it's Emin in her best light.

Weiwei's politics often focus on the billions of Chinese who labour thanklessly in the creation of their country. At PAMM an enormous sculpture made of shiny metal bicycle wheels (a nod to both Duchamp and the only transport available to many working Chinese) has the feel of a war memorial for workers, recognising all those subjugated by the system.

Between these two poles, the business of the fair has gone along briskly, dealers having upped their game with some fighting work. (Miami is no longer the funsome little sister of June's Art Basel but a more serious player in its own right, particularly with its geographical attraction for the Latin American market.)

Gagosian's big gun is the Jeff Koons showstopper 'Baroque Egg with Bow', in scintillating turquoise and hot pink (1994-2008), a massive bundle of symbolism (from new birth to a stealthy restraint, suggested by the big bravura ribbon). At Sadie Coles, Sarah Lucas's 'Tit' chair (2012) - entirely 'upholstered' in stuffed stockings that pop up like perky breasts - is a ribald piece of feminism, poking particularly apposite fun at a Miami audience, where enhancements come as standard. And at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, Martin Creed has constructed an elegant pyramid of bog-standard toilet rolls. It isn't ironic - more an act of transformation of this prerequisite of contemporary life into a perfect architectural component.

Other ways to get noticed include the booth of Neugerriemschneider, which Jorge Pardo has turned into a lush domestic space, lined with cheap fabrics more usually used to make Mexican pinafores (Pardo, who is Cuban, now lives in Merida). Everything is for sale, while other artists' work is encased in the shelving system he has created around the outside of the stand. And at Marianne Boesky, Roxie Paine's massive moving neon piece of a man being knocked down and getting back up could hardly be missed. 'I think it's how artists feel everyday,' says Boesky.

Beyond the Convention Centre, projects take on a more expansive form. LA artist Ry Rocklen has created an art bar, sponsored by Absolut, turning a patch of ground by the W Hotel into a basketball court, filled with chess and ping pong tables created from trophies and trophy parts, a comment, perhaps on the winners and losers that an overly competitive art market now creates.
 
Another large-scale installation came in the inflatable form of a Swiss-style chalet. Perched over the water at the Miami Marina Stadium, its polyurethane skin gently heating in the Florida sun, it is the creation of French artist duo Kolkoz for Swiss watch company Audemar Piguet. 'We love clichés and we love Pop,' say the pair. Indeed.

Daniel Arsham's work is hard to pigeonhole. The Cooper Union art graduate and one-half of design studio Snarkitecture (a partnership with Alex Mustonen) applies his skills to collaborative and interactive projects hovering elegantly between art and design. His new show at the Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) - the result of his residency at Philadelphia organisation - opens today.

Taking inspiration from Hurricane Andrew, which Arsham experienced as a teenager (the show's title 'Reach Ruin' is an anagram for hurricane), the installations explore the 'dramatic and destructive power of nature' and the fragility of architecture.

Also presented on certain dates during the exhibition is an immersive performance titled 'Study for Occupant', created with Arsham's frequent collaborator, choreographer Jonah Bokaer.

Wallpaper* caught up with Arsham to talk about his multi-disciplinary creative approach.

How 'architectural' do you consider your work to be?
My degree was actually not in architecture. I studied art at the Cooper Union but much of my work involves the manipulation of architecture. A number of years ago I formed a design and architecture practice within my studio that allows me to expand in scale and in public space through the collaboration with an architect, Alex Mustonen. We work on projects that relate directly to my work, developing fabrication techniques or making objects and structures that can meet building code. We also make work under Starkitecture, which takes different forms. For example, we just finished a very large pavilion for the entrance of Design Miami.

What was the feeling and message you aimed to convey through this exhibition and the performances?
Much of the work goes back to an experience that I had 20 years ago: a very strong storm in Miami, where I grew up, where I watched the demolition of architecture and the reformation of space in a very quick and violent way. It has always been something that is prevalent in my work but I have never explored it directly. There are a lot of works in this show that relate directly to that, such as the reformation of shuttered or broken materials back into objects.

The performances both relate and don't relate to that. They relate in that there are cameras that exist within the exhibition that are cast from the first film camera I ever owned (a Pentax K1000). They are cast in various 'broken' materials that relate back to that experience, like deconstructed broken pottery, sand or shuttered glass. There are cameras also used in the performance, cast in plaster. And I used blue gels on the floor to recreate the bizarre light that comes with the storm.

What other materials and techniques did you use for this installation?
Part of the mission of the FWM is to encourage artists to work outside their preferred medium. I've never worked with a number of the materials in this exhibition, such as some of the resins we used. Some of the pieces involve wind, light and sound so I worked with an engineer from MIT to develop the performative work that you see in the video. I also worked with compressed glass; I have worked with this technique before where we compress sand and other materials into a mould, but the Fabric Workshop helped me develop this into a larger scale. So I have these massive 16ft-tall eroded columns, which wouldn't have been possible before.

Have you worked with the FWM before?
This is the first time that I worked with the FWM and this project has been ongoing for about a year and a half. I've been coming here, going through their archives. They have an extensive collection, not necessarily of artwork but of ephemera, relating to artists' production. There are boxes and boxes that are very neatly organised containing from studies from the 1980s to things that many artists have worked on while being here, like models and drawings. I really enjoyed this collaboration.

Have you worked in Philadelphia before? What inspired you in the city?
I feel like I have been in a bubble of Philadelphia. Most of the times I have been here have been very intense work periods where I have gone directly from the hotel back to the museum. But the hotel that I am staying in has a very interesting history. There is a plaque outside that indicates that it was the first International Style building built in the US. It was the Philadelphia Savings and Trust I think, and is now the Loews Hotel. It is very interesting to be in a structure that was originally built as an office building and reformed into a living space and there are some real quirks in it. When I woke up this morning I was staring at the ceiling and noticed this angled beam that projects out of the walls and connects with the ceiling. What can be concealed behind that?

We understand this project was conceived to connect with the public. How do you hope to achieve this with the Philadelphia audience?
The choreographer I work with very frequently and also on this piece, Jonah Bokaer, often has very specific ways that he wants audiences to experience the work. In the case of this show, it is a very long room, 30ft wide by 100ft long. He has set up seating on either side of the space, so while the audience is witnessing the work they are also witnessing other people watching the piece from the opposite side, which creates a very different dynamic than working with a stage.

In one sentence, how would you describe your work to somebody who isn't familiar with it?
My work makes architecture do things that it shouldn't do and reforms materials that often cause people to rethink their surroundings.

Watch the making of 'Storm', 2012, comprising crushed glass, foam, paint, a sound system, fans and lights

ADDRESS

The Fabric Workshop and Museum
1214 Arch Street
Philadelphia, PA 19107

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