Jungle Fool Sculpture (All Photos By Gail Unless Otherwise Noted)
Do you love living in NYC, but occasionally like to take a Day Trip so you can get a new cultural perspective, or just go out in nature and explore? I love doing that, but sadly there must generally be an impetus that motivates me to make a plan. Planning (ugh!) is not my favorite thing, but it is sometimes necessary to achieve the goal of having a crazy fun new adventure. Recently, I took day trip with my art-loving pal Teddy outside the City via Metro-North. The impetus: The Haas Brothers have an exhibit at the Katonah Museum of Art!
The importance of storytelling is clear in Anna Sui’s collections, which conjure an imaginary world of Icelandic princesses, pirates, fairies, Vikings and enchanted animals. Complementing these historical and fantastical figures, her runway shows have featured whimsical, surreal accessories from animal hats to gingerbread handbags.
This dress was inspired by Napoleon Bonaparte and the introduction of the Empire style to France in the early nineteenth century.
Sui gave the gown a punk makeover by cutting it off mid-thigh. She created a series of these dresses in silk chiffon and crepe de Chine printed with hearts, roses, stripes and polka dots. Worn with petticoats and produced in a combination of red, white, and black, they recalled the designs of interior decorator Dorothy Draper, who was known for her dramatic deployment of black and white, as well as the punk clothes worn by members of the New York Dolls.
Sui recalls, “Back in the 1970s, if you were part of the rock scene or if you went to clubs like Max’s or CBGB, you only wore red, white or black. Everything was heavily codified.” The French Empire, too, was governed by rigid codes, and this provided the link for Sui’s collection. The Dorothy Draper Pirate ensemble is from Sui’s spring 2007 collection.
Photographed in the Museum of Arts and Design in NYC.
Endearingly known as Chicago’s Mad Hatter, Benjamin Green-Field established the Bes-Ben label with with his sister, Bessie Friedlander in 1919. Green-Field’s designs were equal parts fantasy and practicality; their chic, relativity compact forms were designed to work in concert with the costly coiffures of the period. The year 1941 is regarded as a turning point in his career; the material restrictions that were imposed during World War II roused new levels of creativity in his work and introduced what would become a lasting devotion to crafting whimsical conversational pieces like this Lobster Hat circa 1946.
Detail
Photographed as part of the exhibit In Pursuit of Fashion: The Sandy Schreier Collection, on view through May 17th, 2020 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
Mike Weiss Gallery is currently hosting Stefanie Gutheil’s fourth exhibition with the gallery, The Home of Mr. Peeps and it is all kinds of crazy fun. For this show, the Berlin-based artist has delved deep into the recesses of her imagination – back where horned beasts, laser beams, onesies, a brass marching band, phonographs, multi-talented chickens, the original stooge named Krampus and a giant pink elephant all reside – and emerged with a phantasmagoric stable of characters à la a secularized and hallucinatory version of Noah’s Arc. With this herd of misfit creatures, Gutheil has left normality at the door and transformed the gallery into a sanctuary of the bizarre – a surreal, utopic landscape of chromatic and psychological vibrancy.
With all their quirks and foibles in plain sight, the artist’s fantastical creatures appear to us as friends and intimates. In fact, it is precisely because of the alluring, almost childlike honesty inherent in the figures unabashed eccentricities that connection with the works is nearly inevitable. Yet there is more to these characters than their carnivalesque appearance; in each, Gutheil has instilled an emotional gravity that seems both personally derived and universally comprehensible.
Sometimes the sentiment is uplifting – for example in A Walk in the Forest, where we find two cronies strutting with emoticon-worthy smiles strewn across their faces. Other times, the mood isn’t always so chummy. In Safe Bet, it is impossible to say with certainty whether the winged yet dense-looking humanoid is falling down or flying upward, if it has walked the plank by force or leapt from the diving board by choice.
In their peculiar features and with their hearts on their sleeves, Gutheil’s oddballs all emit a vaguely familiar sense of the folkloric, as if the artist unraveled them from traditional fables and stitched together her own. The horned, anthropomorphic, anti-Santa Claus fictional beast of German-Austrian descent named Krampus, for example, seems to make an appearance in multiple works. Instead of a facsimile representation, though, Gutheil has flipped the idea of Krampus on its head – in one work it walks a man-carrying pig and in another it nonchalantly strolls through the forest with a friend – by stripping it of its menace and making it comical.
Yet in her fairytales, Gutheil has not set a narrative. Instead, she provides all the raw, jumbled materials – the characters, the costumes, the emotions, and the stage – and leaves us to imagine our own farfetched tales, whether somberly retrospective or curiously, whimsically, and optimistically infantile.
Stefanie Gutheil’s The Home of Mr. Peeps will be on Exhibit Through January 30th, 2016 at Mike Weiss Gallery, Located at 520 West 24th Street, in the Chelsea Gallery District.
When you’ve watched as many cake baking competition shows as I have, you know how hard it is to deliberately make a cake that looks like it’s falling apart, but really isn’t. Check out a screen grab from the original Disney film Sleeping Beauty and you can see that whoever made this cake did a pretty amazing job! Just look at those candles!
