RICK OWENS
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about The Doors’ Jim Morrison and the artist Stewart Home, and lo and behold, up pops a new exhibition by the gentleman who could have been their love child (should two men be allowed to reproduce). Rick Owens made his name in the late ‘90s as a fashion designer who took the dark shadows of dystopic, Morrison-esque California (the designer’s native state) and alchemized them into tissue paper-thin leather jackets and denim with an engagingly undernourished silhouette. Always meeting his ‘70s West Coast aura with neo-Gothic elements culled straight from Père Lachaise, the designer has lately been applying his signature Eurofornia aesthetic to furniture, creating sculptural, material-driven pieces that will be on view at a new show opening tomorrow at Salon 94. Meant to emulate the designer’s Parisian boudoir, the exhibition features a daybed constructed in part from a huge block Alabaster–which practically begs for a psychic rendering of Vincent Price en repose. While the title of the show, Pavane for a Dead Princess, is culled from French fin de siècle composer Maurice Ravel, it reminded me of English artist Stewart Home’s 2002 book 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess. Home is a conceptual provocateur whose body of work included SMILE, a magazine that anyone, anywhere could publish at any time. In his heyday, Home created a highly idiosyncratic practice that blended humor and darkness with a heavy dusting of ‘80s and ‘90s postmodern pastiche–aligning him, in non-conformist spirit at least, with Owens, who found an early muse in performance artist Kembra Pfahler and who has always been fashion’s most reliable rebel. And he does sofas? Yes please.
Pavane for a Dead Princess opens on May 8 at Salon 94, 12 East 94th Street NYC
