MGMT have dropped a new video for “Alien Days” from their self-titled record, which plays on the differences between past and present, human and alien. It features a couple who appear to be living during the 19th century, as well as a pair of dancing aliens.
TweetDutch-born Viviane Sassen is one of the most exciting figures in contemporary fashion photography. Her imagery is challenging and flamboyant, formally inventive and occasionally surreal. She has created campaigns for fashion houses including Carven, Stella McCartney and M Missoni and has produced editorials in magazines such as Purple, i-D and Dazed & Confused. In 2007 Sassen received the Prix de Rome and in 2011 was awarded the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Applied and Fashion Photography. In 2013 she exhibited in the Central Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. This exhibition is Sassen’s first retrospective and comes to the Portrait Gallery from Huis Marseille Museum, Amsterdam.
Exhibition runs through to February 9th, 2014
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
1 Queen Street
Edinburgh
EH2 1JD
Swedish camera manufacturer Hasselblad presents a trio of special edition takes on its Stellar design. Retaining the guts of the Sony RX100 alongside a 28-100mm Carl Zeiss-branded zoom lens, a 20-megapixel 1”-type sensor, wide range ISO, full HD video and a 3.6x optical zoom capability, the special edition releases include black, white and orange body colors with bespoke leather cases and matching straps for both the shoulder and wrist
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In tandem with his pattern paintings, Wool developed a body of work that similarly subverted a set of existing forms, this time using language as his appropriated subject matter. Rendering a word or phrase in bold, blocky stencils arrayed across a geometric grid, he preserved the specific form and order of the language, but freely stripped out punctuation, disrupted conventional spacing, and removed letters. The resulting compositions oscillate between verbal communication and pure formalism, with their structural dissonance reflecting the state of anxiety and agitation conjured by the texts themselves.
The silkscreen has been a primary tool for Wool since the 1990s. In his earliest screenprinted paintings, he expanded on the vocabulary of the pattern works, enlarging their stylized floral motifs for use as near-abstract units of composition. In this period, Wool frequently sabotaged his existing forms as a way to covertly generate new ones, layering the flower icons in dense, overlapping configurations that congeal into a single black mass or become obscured with passages of brusque overpainting. He also introduced a new, entirely freehand gesture in the form of a looping line applied with a spray gun—an irreverent interruption of the imagery below that evokes an act of vandalism on a city street.
Over the past decade, Wool’s simultaneous embrace and repression of painting’s expressive potential have culminated in an open-ended vein of works that he refers to as his “gray paintings.” In these large-scale abstractions, Wool alternates between the act of erasing and the act of drawing, repeatedly wiping away sprayed black enamel paint to create layers of tangled lines and hazy washes. The artist describes the cycle of composition and loss inherent to this process as an attempt to harness the condition of doubt into a generative creative force. The same challenge to the authority of the unique, original gesture is extended in Wool’s most recent silkscreened canvases, which use digital processing to warp the scale, color, and resolution of his painted marks, often merging them with details from other paintings.
Exhibition runs through to January 22nd, 2014
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 5th Ave
New York
NY
10128
United States
Best known as a painter of monumental works in oil, Sean Scully (b.1945) has garnered international acclaim as one of the most prominent painters in the abstract tradition, fusing the conventions of European painting with the distinct character of American abstraction. This is the first exhibition to explore the artist’s engagement with the triptych format, which has obsessed him for nearly three decades. It will feature major paintings, as well as drawings and etchings, from across the last 40 years.
Exhibition runs through to January 26th, 2014
Pallant House Gallery
9 North Pallant
Chichester
West Sussex
PO19 1TJ
The exhibition will showcase a fantastically varied series of rare screen-prints, linoprints, etchings and original canvases. Stanley’s art veers from propagandist graphics to introspective illustrations.
His consistant strength is his ability to combine deep, personal and political emotions with modesty and humour. The weighty subjects are not examined not entirely seriously but certainly respectfully. Apocalypse Boutique aims to highlight the artist’s unique style and endless diversity.
Amongst the collection will be the last remaining original canvas from the ‘Hail to the Thief’ series, known internationally as the inspiration behind Radiohead’s number one Grammy Award Winning album. Stanley Donwood has been Radiohead’s in-house artist since he and Thom Yorke met at Exeter University. The powerful visual identity he’s created for the band is considered so in tune with Thom Yorke’s music that the debate still rages as to whether he and Yorke are one and the same.
Exhibition runs through to December 1st, 2013
Hang-Up Gallery
56 Stoke Newington High Street
London
N16 7PB
