Irenebrination: Notes on Architecture, Art, Fashion, Fashion Law, Science & Technology

Fragile Fashion: Iris van Herpen's "Dimensionism"

In the last few posts we looked at architecture as an inspiration for fashion projects and, among the fashion designers inspired by this discipline, there is Iris van Herpen.

The Dutch designer recently posted on her social media pages her latest project - a unique dress that she dubbed "Dimensionism", created in collaboration with glassblower Bernd Weinmayer.

The design is reminiscent of a tutu, but, rather than being made with tulle like conventional ballerina costumes, it was three-dimensionally blown in glass.

The dress looks as if it were made with water, and it could be considered as a development of van Herpen's 2010 design for the "Fashion & Architecture" exhibition at Amsterdam's ARCAM. In that occasion the designer developed with Dutch firm Benthem Crouwel Architekten, a water-dress inspired by Jan Benthem and Mels Crouwel’s project for the renovation of the Stedelijk Museum that included a sort of bathtub-shaped extension.

In that case van Herpen imagined to play with the water that the tub may have contained and on the effects it may have created if a woman's body had entered it. The result was a Plexiglass-like synthetic material used for the main design and for the wing-like effects that gave the illusion the wearer may have been hit by the contents of one or two buckets of water that had frozen around her body. In this case instead we have a more defined silhouette entirely made in sustainable glass. 

"I have always dreamed to make a look that reflects the purity and beauty of water, it's a continuous thread throughout my work," the designer stated on her Instagram page, adding, "This look pushes the boundaries of all the techniques we have explored till now."

Born in Germany, Weinmayer studied scientific glassblowing and runs his studio from Austria. The recipient of numerous awards, Weinmayer is a unique glassblower known for his masterful flame-worked borosilicate glass techniques which he uses to create detailed, realistic and surreal glass art.

He also incorporates dynamic gas plasma light in his flowing clear glass forms to create magical glass light sculptures that glow with brightly coloured effects. This is not the first time Weinmayer collaborated with van Herpen: in 2019 he made for her a 1.5 m sculpture of a face mask using the rod net technique.

Will this collaboration continue? Let's hope so, "Dimensionism" may not be ideal for a ballet, but it would be amazing if one day the designer would create a costume for a ballet in glass incorporating the effects Weinmayer obtains integrating gas plasma light in his sculptures.  

Sophisticated Architectural Details for Fashion Design

In yesterday’s post we looked at a new collection of tiles wondering if one day we may see their geometries and colour combinations reinterpreted or applied to accessories. But you don't need to literally apply an idea seen in a field such as interior design to another field like fashion. You can indeed rework one detail in a subtle way into a collection, and architecture can offer us plenty of inspirations and details to reinvent or get inspired by.

The buildings and structures designed by international architecture firm Bar Orian Architects can, for example, provide us with intriguing details. 

Established by Tal and Gidi Bar Orian in 1990, the firm is specialized in the preservation of historic buildings (including Tel Aviv's Bauhaus buildings) and in designing modern additions and extensions annexed to iconic buildings, something that allows the architects to create in this way interesting clashes between different eras and styles. 

A while back the firm renovated for example The Levee, a 1913 villa in Tel Aviv, reinventing it as luxury accomodation and evoking in its minimal concrete and slatted steel addition that seems to be floating on the roof, the Japanese wabi-sabi notion.

The contrast between classic and modern is a juxtaposition often seen in fashion, but filtered through the architectural lenses it may offer new interpretations.

If you like geometry, instead, check out other inspirations from Bar Orian's portfolio, including the aerial view of the firm's Ben Gurion University's student dormitories, the geometrical details (reminiscent of the coffers in Rome's Pantheon) sculpted on the façade of the Farmer's House in Tel Aviv or the square element that looks as if it were fluctuating on the HaShoftim Tower in Tel Aviv.

The firm recently completed, in collaboration with with Schwartz Besnosoff Architects, the Ahad Haam Tower. Located in Haifa's Hadar neighborhood, the socio-economic and cultural centre of the city, the tower is inspired by the principles of the Garden City.

Architect Richard Kaufman, influenced by Sir Ebenezer Howard, an English urban planner, designed the Hadar neighborhood in the '30s, moving from European garden cities and integrating residential and community gardens, aiming at providing in this way a higher standard of living for residents by incorporating nature into the urban setting.

Throughout the decades the neighborhood changed and, in more recent years, it became a symbol of Jewish-Palestinian coexistence.

Ahad Haam Tower comprises residential and commercial spaces, artist studios, and a library as well. Alongside the skyscraper, there is also the Birkenheim House, a 19th-century Templar building, restored to serve as a commercial area that hosts artist studios and a café.

The architectural elements that may prove inspiring in this case are to be found in the three-dimensional façade. Maybe those elements could be more inspiring for jewelry rather than fashion designers (it is almost too easy to picture in your mind the vertical labyrinthine design of the façade reinvented for a pair of long earrings in precious metals), but it is clear that the firm's sophisticated approach can lead creative minds with a discerning eye to unexplored paths towards innovative modern design solutions. Who's up for this architectural challenge? 

Modernist Marble Geometries: Studio KO X Bisazza

Milan's Salone del Mobile is ready to return next month (from 7th to 12th June) after the Covid-19 Omicron variant alert earlier on this year prompted the organisers to postpone it.

The trade show is celebrating its 60th anniversary with a focus on sustainability, but, as designers, architects and companies are starting to reveal the products they will present, it looks like there is another theme that will be trending - geometry.

Luxury tile and glass mosaic manufacturer Bisazza, for example, turned to French architecture duo Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty for their new collection, characterised by basic geometries in mesmerising configurations.

Fournier and Marty founded Studio KO, based in Paris and Marrakech, in 2000 and, since then, they have been focusing on architecture and interior/furniture design, privileging primary and ancestral materials - stone, wood, metal and leather.

Apart from being very passionare about the materiality of textures, the duo also favour juxtapositions. One of the recurring themes in their practice is the interplay between light and shadows.

Studio KO's collection for Bisazza features three modern and minimalist patterns ideal to create innovative geometrical shapes and light/shadows contrasts.

For this collaboration, the duo moved from the Italian tradition and in particular from the tile motifs found in Pompeii, the intricate floors of St. Mark's Basilica, and the architectural works of Gio Ponti and Piero Portaluppi.

The three resulting patterns - Modulo 1, Modulo 2 and Modulo 3 - can be used for floors or walls, and come in three different colors, Chiaroscuro, Monocromo and Policromo, all in a matte finish.

While Modulo 1 is based on a sequential repetition of one rectangle in different colours with a cadence that calls to mind an algorithmic structure, Modulo 2 is composed of two triangles, and the resulting pattern is an attempt at recreating a textile weave in marble (this is clearer in the Monocromo version, look at the fifth image in this post from a distance and you'll clearly spot the textile weave pattern).

Last but not least, the (semi) circle animates Modulo 3, composed of three elements, a triangle, a semi-circle and a square with a half circle cut out that can interact with the semi-circle tile.

The three patterns come in a combination of black, white and grey (Chiaroscuro), or in a densely veined white marble with golden elements (Monocromo) and in ocher, black and grey (Policromo).

The consistency and texture of marble proves fascinating for many designers, Studio KO included. "Marble is our chosen material featured in almost all our projects. Its rich heritage and, at the same time, contemporary elegance, make it a source of unlimited creativity and innovation," Fournier and Marty state in a press release about this collaboration.

"As architects and connoisseurs of understated elegance, we pay tribute to this treasured mineral through a reworking of modern domestic concepts that transforms the traditional aesthetic customs, uses and, often, functions of marble."

Collezione Studio KO for Bisazza is the first collaboration between the architecture firm and the Italian brand, and will be on view during Salone del Mobile in Milan, while it is already available in all the Bisazza flagship stores in Milan, Paris, London and New York.

It's only natural to wonder if Studio KO will turn their geometrical patterns one day into a collaboration with a fashion house: the more you look at this collection, the more you feel that, at some point, we may see these patterns translated into luxury leather bags.

Actually a collaboration between the architecture studio and a fashion house is not unlikely as Studio KO already worked for somebody very close to a fashion house, as they were commissioned the Yves Saint Laurent Museum Marrakech (that opened in 2017) by Pierre Bergé.

The City as Living Organism: Mirador Torre Glòries, Barcelona

There's always great excitement when a new landmark is added to a city as the skyline mutates and the city is radically transformed by the activities carried out in the new building and by the people who populate it.

Designed by famous architects Jean Nouvel and Fermín Vázquez, Torre Glòries is one of the most emblematic buildings of Barcelona. Located in the city's technology district and inaugurated in 2005, the 144-metre-high building was renovated and redesigned in 2017.

There is now a new addition in the skyscraper, the Mirador Torre Glòries (opening on 20th May). Conceived as a new cultural, multi-disciplinary and entertainment landmark, the Mirador began to take shape five years ago, as a way to offer locals and visitors a platform to discover the city from the building.

The Mirador is indeed an observation platform with three different installations - Hyperview Barcelona, The Observation Deck and Cloud Cities by Tomás Saraceno - conceived as three architectural adventures through the city.

Hyperview allows to discover the city through art, science and technology. Located on the basement floor of the building, this installation is divided in different sections - Prologue, Barcelonians, Atmospheres, Rhythms and Sirena. None of them allows visitors to see the actual city, but they are designed as pieces of a larger puzzle. These sections contain indeed sounds, rhythms, noises and moods that invite people to put their finger on the pulse of the city and feel its beating heart.

Prologue acts as an introduction, a tuner to the city; Barcelonians is instead a non-anthropocentric installation, a forest of 132 delicate folded-paper sculptures by Joan Sallas representing a variety of vegetable and animal species including hedgehogs, fungi, waterlilies, jellyfish and fin whales living around the city.

Atmospheres invites viewers to discover the sky, wind, sea and sounds of the city through real-time data, while Rhythms looks at the city as if it were an organism and explores its metabolic processes. Last but not least, Sirena offers a soundtrack to Barcelona, interpreted and set to music by Maria Arnal and John Talabot.

The most interesting thing about these installations is the fact that they are unique and unrepeatable because they are generated automatically, using real-time data of the city harvested from sensors and instruments recording a variety of information.

In this way, you get the feeling that the city is constantly changing and transforming, through its systems and infrastructures, urban technologies and ecosystems. The music in Sirena, for example, mutates every day according to the wind speed, weather, phases of the moon, sea temperature and level of particles in the air.

The Observation Deck, on the 30th floor, offers a 360° view over Barcelona at a height of 125 metres: this space is where the information viewers received in the first installation can be matched with the landscape. Here it is possible to admire the mountains and the coastline, the Sagrada Família and the most modern part of the city, the 22@ innovation district, representing 21st-century Barcelona.

In the same space, there's a special multi-sensory walk-in art installation, Cloud Cities, by contemporary Argentina-born, Berlin-based artist Tomás Saraceno. The artist is known for his works suspended between art, architecture, technology and science, and for his studies about spiders that led him to the creation of the Arachnophilia platform.

As the title suggests, the installation in Barcelona is a sort of cloud formed by a series of pentagons and hexagons, creating 113 cloud spaces, made of 5000 nodes connecting 6 km of tensile cables.

The configuration is similar to the "Aero(s)cene" installation Saraceno did in the Gaggiandre area of the Arsenale at the 58th International Art Exhibition in Venice and that comprised 36 clouds, cluster-like structures inspired by the Weaire-Phelan geometry of aggregating foam and soap bubbles. 

The geometrical elements form hidden nests where visitors can sit down and, suspended from a vantage point, ponder about the future of the cities from an environmental perspective, consider worldwide challenges going from wars to global pandemics, social justice and the modern plague of misinformation, or take a break choosing from the books on offer.

Saraceno's first permanent interactive sculpture in southern Europe, Cloud Cities is indeed a way to engage in collective critical reflections and activate zones of emergence, disrupting the rigid verticality of the skyscraper and offering alternative geometries of togetherness, to rediscover the power of the collective after Covid-19 and social distancing.

"For millennia, humans have looked to the clouds and the behaviours of plants and animals to predict collective futures, finding messages hidden in their changing shapes and habits. Yet, in the context of the Capitalocene, the knowledge of entire ecosystems is being threatened and clouds are disappearing, replaced by toxic plumes of pollution and digital misinformation," Saraceno states about the inspiration behind his work, wondering, "Can an observatory in the 21st century, with its distant gaze, sense within and imagine something other than clouds in the shape of castles in the sky?"

Image credits for this post

1 - 3. Courtesy Mirador Torre Glòries. Photography Mirador Torre Glòries

4 - 10. Tomás Saraceno, Installation views of Cloud Cities Barcelona, 2022. Courtesy Studio Tomás Saraceno and Mirador Torre Glòries. Photography Studio Tomás Saraceno © Tomás Saraceno

Inspiring Joys of Mudlarking

In yesterday's post we looked at Raimondo di Sangro fascination with quipus. The prince of Sansevero was known for being a rather peculiar character, an alchemist prone to experiment with different materials, human bones included.

In his palace he had a furnace similar to those ones you may find in a glassmaker's workshop and a chemist's laboratory as well, with a variety of burners. Through his experiments he managed to produce artificial gems and discovered a system to colour glass. He actually managed to reproduce a variety of hard stones, including agate and lapis lazuli and made experiments that brought out or enhanced the colours of some stones and turned coloured gems into white stones. Last but not least, he managed to permeate glass with any colour.

If you like alchemy, but also medicine/science and enjoy mudlarking as well (to discover hidden, unusual and inspiring treasures...), check out the coloured glass medicine bottles from the 17th and 18th century currently part of the "Style London" sale at Sotheby's. Excavated or found on the banks of the Thames, they are inspiring for their green, yellowish and black colours and for the way water, mud and soil aged the glass. The bottles may have contained medicines, but they are reminiscent of the sort of jars, flasks and containers that may have been spotted in an alchemist's workshop like Raimondo di Sangro's.

Art & Fashion Challenge: The Quipu, from Cecilia Vicuña Back to Raimondo di Sangro

In a previous post we mentioned Cecilia Vicuña's quipus: Andean recording and numbering devices used to keep accounts or record events, quipus consist of knotted strings made of cotton and other fibers. For the Chilean artist, activist and poet the quipu is "a poem in space, a way to remember, involving the body and the cosmos at once". Centuries before Vicuña, the mysterious Neapolitan alchemist Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of Sansevero, was spellbound by quipus.

In 1751, Raimondo di Sangro, printed on his private press the "Lettera Apologetica" (also known as "Letter in Defence of the Academician Esercitato of the Crusca containing his Defence of the book entitled Letters of a Peruvian woman concerning the hypothesis regarding the Quipu addressed to the Duchess of S**** and published by the same"), a rather bizarre yet colourful esoteric text inspired by quipus.

The "Lettera Apologetica" was a complete novelty for those times as it was printed in different colours, but it also contained some rather radical messages. In the "Apologetica" the prince of Sansevero - moving from the publication of the Lettres d’une péruvienne (1747) by Françoise de Graffigny, an exotic epistolary novel whose main character, according to the writer, had used the quipu for some of her missives - defended this ancient communication system.

In reality Raimondo di Sangro was using the quipu as a pretext to spread the pantheist message, support the need for free thought, support unorthodox theories on the origin of the world and proclaim hostility to the interference of the Church and to the introduction of Inquisition Courts in the Kingdom of Naples. His contemporaries believed that, between the lines of the "Apologetica", the prince was also spreading the values of freemasonry and principles from the cabalistic and esoteric traditions.

We may not know for sure what di Sangro had in mind, but from the typographical point of view, the "Apologetica" was incredibly innovative since it was printed in four colours with a single turn of the press, a new surprising invention by the prince himself. The text is accompanied by foldable illustrations that include the graphical representations of the main signs or "Master Words" of the ancient Inca language; the translation of a Peruvian song into quipus and a transliteration of the Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, German and English alphabets in quipu.

The "Lettera Apologetica" didn't get much luck, censors of the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books got angry about its esoteric contents and principles contrary to the doctrine of the Church and, in 1752, condemned the work as infected by "foul plague" prohibiting it. The Prince of Sansevero tried to get the book removed from the list of forbidden books highlighting he had written it in an ironic key, but never managed to do so.

The quipu could be an intriguing idea for a fashion collection, for what regards both garments and accessories (it could be used for prints but also for knotted techniques) - anybody interested in the quipu challenge in fashion, moving from Vicuña's installations or Raimondo di Sangro's esoteric translations into quipus? 

Dynamic Colours & Layered Textures: Katharina Grosse's "Apollo Apollo" @ Espace Louis Vuitton, Venice

That German artist Katharina Grosse would have ended up collaborating at some point with a fashion house was already in the air since her colourful lunar landscapes were installed at the Venice Art Biennale in 2015. In that case her installation at the Arsenale in Venice featured draped textiles, huge blocks of Styrofoam carved into shapes that resembled fragments of meteorites, rubble, and piles of cement covered in bold and bright colours.

Other installations followed including Grosse's first solo show in China, "Mumbling Mud", a sort of psychedelic experience that comprised a labyrinthine structure of folds made with heavy, coarse fabrics (vaguely reminiscent of Sam Gilliam's drape paintings) draped from the ceiling of the museum and designed to embrace, engulf and swallow visitors and alter their perceptions with their clashing colours.

The more you stared at these installations and at Grosse's dynamic dialogues between her draped fabrics and the architectures surrounding them, the more you thought her work would have been transformed into the set for a catwalk show or the inspiration for a fashion collection.

Instead Grosse was commissioned an installation at the Espace Louis Vuitton in Venice (Calle Ridotto, 1353; on display until 27th November 2022).

A Collateral Event of the 59th International Art Exhibition, Grosse's "Apollo Apollo" is inspired by the artist's experiments with printed photographs on fabrics such as polyester and silk. Images of her painting practice and of her hands covered in bright paint were the starting point for the installation.

"Apollo Apollo" consists in an oroton-like fabric, with colourful prints of the artist's hands, draped across the wall and the floor of the exhibition space. Under the metallic chainmail fabric you can spot some objects, including a coil of rope and a pair of sneakers.

The metallic fluidity and flexibility of this vast expanse of silvery glittering metal is a reference to Venice and in particular to Fortuny's fabrics, gold mosaic tesserae and light reflecting on water, making it shimmer.

On her Facebook page, the artist posted pictures of the research work behind the installation and one picture with a rope half covered in the metallic mesh, perfectly shows the mesmerizing effects Grosse obtained by simply covering random items with the metallic fabric.

As she states about the installation: "The printed image I have chosen comes from a series of photographs showing actions that are connected to my painting practice, though here on the mesh fabric it seems to be a mere residue of an image of a very sharp photographic moment (...) the everyday objects in the work seem to evade their meaning. Under the mesh they seem not as clear as you might want them to be to actually pin them down. It's actually a multiple layer backwards, a removal of what is nameable, what is actually identifiable."

But there are more appointments to jot down in their diaries for Grosse's fans: the artist is also part of the group exhibition (including works by Sam Gilliam, Steven Parrino, Niele Toroni and Megan Rooney⁠) "La Couleur en fugue" (Fugues in Color) at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (thorugh 29th August).

"The Splinter", the installation for "Fugues in Color" is a monumental celebration of paint and colours: escaping from the canvas, the paint invades walls and floors, hitting the ceiling.

Colours seem to expand from twenty plywood triangular forms and dynamically extend into the architecture, interacting in this way with the Frank Gehry-designed building.

The architectural collaboration between Grosse's work and Gehry's building will continue this autumn when an original work by Grosse commissioned by the Fondation Louis Vuitton will be installed on-site.

Is the Fashion Industry Losing its Predicting Skills?

In The Age of Extremes the late Eric Hobsbawm stated: "Why brilliant fashion designers, a notoriously non-analytic breed, sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors, remains one of the most obscure questions in history; and, for the historian of culture, one of the most central."

When he wrote the book, producing one of the most loved quotes of all times for the fashion industry, the historian seemed annoyed by the fact that scholars and politicians had failed to see the developments of the world, while fashion designers had proved very capable, amost as if they had a crystal sphere in their ateliers.

Those ones who do not agree with Hobsbawm, argue that this is not true as fashion designers do not predict the future, but have their finger on the pulse of society. Hence we got Space Age fashion in the '60s as trips to the moon brought a wind of optimism and hope in space discoveries. 

But there is a way for fashion designers to predict the future - and that's by knowing the past. Yet there are some interferences in this process of analysis of the past that make you wonder if fashion has lost its magic to predict the future. The fashion industry's skill to predict has indeed been replaced by a mad desire to jump on the most successful bandwagon passing by.

The industry started losing its magic around the end of February 2020 when the Coronavirus pandemic spread in the North of Italy. In Milan Armani decided to hold his runway show behind closed doors, but, to some, the decision sounded like an exaggeration, and the Parisian runways continued as if nothing had happened. You can't predict a pandemic maybe, but the industry failed to acknowledge this was an emergency. When it did, though, it reacted quickly by producing face masks and PPE. At the same time, while students started following distance learning classes and most people worked from home, it took a while to fashion houses to see the potential of the digital realm and a few months before realising there was some genuine fashion potential in videogame titles à la Animal Crossing.

Then slowly, little by little, after endless digital runways, things returned to normal and the circus more or less restarted in the same format we had lost in March 2020. The Metaverse in the meantime expanded, with fashion weeks and fashion stores and boutiques, but then again virtual worlds where we can be whoever we want to be already existed in the early 2000s, so what's new with that?
 
The realization that NFTs may have been the future (several months after that infamous Christie's sale), prompted fashion houses to join the madness with their own NFTs. Yet, by now, you feel this is a market that has already been saturated often by better ideas and designs than the ones offered by fashion houses.

But the failed predictions continued: at the beginning of May, Gucci announced it will start accepting a wide range of cryptocurrencies, but the crypto sector has just gone through a major slump. On Thursday stablecoins collapsed; Bitcoin and ethereum, the two biggest cryptocurrencies, shed 5% and 12% respectively (they both fell more than 20% over the past week); dogecoin fell10% on Thursday and 35% over the week. 

You wonder, has fashion lost its Midas touch or developed the flip side of the Midas touch? Well, there are a few things that happened to the industry: first and foremost, fashion is succumbing to the general chaos we are living in. It is distracted by the all embracing noises of social media and by the urge of posting on Instagram quick things that will keep people engaged for less than 24 hours and hopefully generate media revenue that will turn into real money. Besides, fashion is also intensely looking at the present to find inspirations and trends to follow (yes, rather than generating trends, it seems more interested in following them). Last but not least, it has partially lost its touch with reality: there are brands, companies and houses that expressed their support to Ukraine and organised donations as well. But, for the most part, the industry seems to be sitting and watching rather than acting in the case of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, maybe worried about a future when the war will be over and they may not be able to re-enter the Russian market after the sanctions on Russia. 

There is something that fashion has developed and that's a talent for proposing some ideas that may solve current issues: climate change has pushed fashion to develop more sustainable options or materials, but only in the long term we will see if they will have some real benefits. So, the question at the end of this post is simple - is there a way to restore fashion's divinatory power? Well, if it wants to go back to being a veritable oracle rather than a follower of passing trends, fashion will have to start again investigating the past, analyse hard-learned lessons and look at history from a critical perspective. A clear vision of the future, doesn't come indeed from uncontrollably jumping from one Insta-trend to the next in the desperate hope of making more and more money, but from taking the time to find clues in the past to read into the present and finally foresee the future.

The Richly Textured Dotted Abstractions of Howardena Pindell

Coming up with innovative textures is something that creative minds from a variety of fields aim for, from fashion designers to videogame developers, and, obviously, artists.

Howardena Pindell has been doing so throughout her career, animating her canvases with stencilled dots or tiny, hole-punched layered and collaged paper discs. At times these confetti-like configurations integrate delicate sequins coated in paint and watercolour or sprinkled with glitter or baby powder across the surface to create visual feasts of colour and light.

In one of her untitled drawings-collages from 1973, Pindell used over 20 thousand hand-numbered paper dots. As she stated in interviews, writing numbers for her is like drawing and, we may add, it is also something that connects her with her childhood as her father was a mathematician. Reminiscent of pointillism, these constellations of dots created a dense and rich surface, but also represent a symbolic landscape.

The circle, a perfect shape that calls to mind the sun, the moon and the Earth, is actually linked in her practice to a memory from her childhood when she drank root beer with her dad in Ohio. During segregation it was court-mandated that dishes and silverware had to be designated whether someone of colour could use them, and the dot in her practice hints at the red circle under mugs seen in that occasion. Quite often Pindell's life inspired the themes and techniques for her artworks.

Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Pindell was already into art as a young child and received her BFA from Boston University in 1965 and her MFA from the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1967. She then went on to work as assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

MoMA's first African American curator, while working at the museum, Pindell continued to produce art at night, often getting inspired from the pieces included in the museum's collections and exhibitions, such as the Akan batakari tunics in the exhibit African Textiles and Decorative Arts.

Yet, while working for the museum, Pindell experienced gender and racial biases and eventually left her job. In 1972, Pindell she co-founded the A.I.R. Gallery, which was the first artist-directed gallery for women artists in the United States.

A year later she showed her works with circles at the A.I.R. (Artists-In-Residence) Gallery in SoHo. Around the same time Pindell began work on her "Video Drawings" series. Inspired by the artificial light from her television monitor, she wrote small numerals on acetate, which she stuck to the TV screen. She then photographed her drawings placed over the monitor.

After a car accident, Pindell suffered severe memory loss and, to put together traces of her past, she started integrating fragments of photographs and postcards of familiar places into her paintings. Apart from working as a memoirist, Pindell also turned into an activist: after her accident she started producing more political works that addressed a variety of themes including racism, slavery, violence, child abuse, marginalization, exploitation, feminism, homelessness, wars in Cambodia, Vietnam and the Sudan and the Aids crisis.

In 1980 she made a ground-breaking video called "Free, White, and 21", a conversation between herself and her own caricature of a white woman, to address the difficulties faced by non-white women artists in a space dominated by white women.

Her most recent video "Rope/Fire/Water" (2019) was inspired by George Floyd's murder and by a lynching photo she saw as a child on Life magazine. The video looks at slavery and the civil rights movement and includes Martin Luther King's words of warning: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere".

Pandell's dotted abstractions are not politically engaged, but her abstract works remain iconically mesmerising for their texture and three-dimensionality (also from a fashion point of view - they are indeed extremely inspiring to create inovative surfaces in a variety of creative fields), even though they weren't often appreciated.

As she often highlights in interviews, abstract artists within the African-American community were considered the enemy pandering to the white world; white dealers would instead say that African-Americans who did abstract work were inauthentic.

Pandell also used her dotted abstractions for her large-scale grid-like canvases: her work "Untitled #24", for example, seen from a distance looks totally white, but a close up reveals to the viewer that the canvas is cut into squares stitched together and covered in dots, sequins, and glitter.

The richly textured canvas is currently available from Christie's 20th Century Evening Sale, opening today in New York, and you wonder if this piece will be bought by an art collector or will catch the eye of any fashion designer passionate about surfaces, textures and three-dimensional effects.  

The Power of Collective Art, The Metaphors Behind the Multitudes: Antony Gormley's "Asian Field" @ M+, Hong Kong

In 1989 British artist Antony Gormley started working on a very physical project, his "Field" series. The approach behind each "Field" was the same: a local community would mould figures by hand from locally sourced clay. Throughout the years Gormley created "Fields" in Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, and South America.

But it was after making his "fields" in Britain and in Malmö that he started thinking about going to China. The project was ambitious as it was conceived as Gormley's biggest "Field" since it had to represent China's size and population.

Officially started in 1995 with a first visit and an exploration of the locations and conditions for production, the project properly developed only in 2003 when Gormley identified the ideal location - Xiangshan Village (now Huadong Town), in the outskirts of the city of Guangzhou.

For five days villagers of all ages together with students from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, worked on making the clay figures, following Gormley's instructions for this project - each sculpture had to be hand-sized, able to stand vertically on its own, and have two eyes facing forward and looking up towards the horizon. Makers were otherwise free to improvise.

One of the most beautiful things about the project was the fact that different generations of locals - grandparents, parents, and children - worked on the pieces. At the end of the project, the locals made approximately 210,000 clay figurines.

Guangzhou-based photographer Zhang Hai'er created a series of portraits - entitled "Maker and Made" - pairing each maker with their sculpture, focusing on the gaze of the person portrayed to show how that was almost imprinted into the little clay statue. The figurine becomes therefore a representation of the person portrayed, travelling all over the world together with the memories and the story of the person who made it.

In previous projects from the '80s and the '90s, Gormley moved from his own body to create iron or lead sculptures, often monumental, that were then installed in a variety of spaces, to spark up a dialogue with vast architectural locations or with the elements when the pieces were placed outdoors. The focus of this practice re-shifted instead on the collectivity.

With the "Field" series Gormley investigated indeed the power of the collective, resizing the pieces, but multiplying them and opting for a fully collaborative experience. The artist's self is therefore dispersed among the crowd composing the field.

Requiring a minimum of 2,000 square metres for the installation, "Asian Field" was first exhibited in an underground carpark in Guangzhou in 2003; then it was on display at a museum in Beijing, a warehouse in Shanghai, and a former underground air-raid shelter in Chongqing.

The installation is currently on display at Hong Kong's M+, one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world. This is the first time the work has been shown inside a purpose-built museum space.

As an installation, "Asian Field" is meant to be experienced from a single point of view, from the threshold of the exhibition space, so that visitors end up gazing across this dense yet quiet sea of figures that look mesmerizing.

Confronted by this "Field", by this army of clay people, visitors feel overwhelmed, yet not in awe as you may feel in front of the Terracotta Warriors. But they also realise they have a connection with the figurines looking up towards the sky, as if they were deep in thought, exploring, contemplating the progress of humanity. The visitors do share indeed something with that crowd - responsibilities towards one another and towards our planet. 

The most significant thing about Gormley's fields is that they acquire new metaphorical meanings as they years pass. It is therefore impossible to stare at the vast expanse of humanity forming the installation of "Asian Field" at M+ without thinking about the global pandemic, modern migrations, the anxieties of climate change and the death and destruction brought by the war in Ukraine.