In the 1990s, Alexander McQueen formed a close relationship with the photographer Ann Ray (Anne Deniau), allowing her to photograph his studio and shows forming what he called, ‘my life in pictures’. Thirteen of these pictures will be on display at V&A in preparation for the upcoming exhibit Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty.
The work of Francesca Woodman, the prodigious photographer who took her life in 1981 by jumping out of a window, is now on display at the Marian Goodman gallery in New York.
Interest in Woodman’s work has resurged after the 2011-2012 exhibits at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with several books being published in their wake.
“Limelight, 1983,” is the title of one of the prints that opens Ken Schles’ show at Howard Greenberg Gallery of gritty, grainy, high-contrast prints of downtown New York. ‘Entering The Palladium, 1985” is the title of another. “Chair 619 East 5th Street, 1984” is another. (That’s pretty damn east by the way, 619, even by today’s standards). “View From 224 Avenue B, 1983.” “Boy on East 5th Street, 1984.”
I had forgotten that Doubleday editor Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis originally commissioned the photographs from Unseen Versailles by the late Deborah Turbeville that are on view at Staley Wise in 1981. The mind at first could not, perhaps did not, want to reconcile the withdrawn, intimate vision that is Turbeville’s with the stately, public and, one imagines, rigid New York of Kennedy Onassis.
“Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion” is currently showing at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), in Brisbane, Australia. The exhibition comes from the archives of the prestigious Kyoto Costume Institute and explores the influence Japanese fashion designers have had over the last thirty years.
The comprehensive collection is comprised of more than one hundred pieces from the heavyweights like Rei Kawakubo of