Carla Sozzani>10 Corso Como>Book

Unlike her lovable loose cannon of a sister, Franca Sozzani (Italian Vogue editor-in-chief and endlessly quotable un-PC font), Carla Sozzani keeps a relatively low profile. As a former gallerist in Milan, she quietly opened Galleria Carla Sozzani in 1990, which exploded just a year later into the fashion/design concept store — thought to be the first — known by everyone today as 10 Corso Como. It is now a bustling space dedicated to the explorations of culture, literature, culinary art, and music. There is even now a boutique hotel, where many of fashion's cognoscenti stay when in town for Milan Fashion Week, as they are this week.

In May, Rizzoli will publish a monograph of the store, authored by Carla Sozzani herself, called A to Z. And it is exactly that, an A to Z dictionary of her universe, beginning with Azzedine ("Since 1980 I have sat at his long table in the atelier. We eat and talk late into the evenings, speaking of new plans and recalling wonderful times we have shared") and ending with The Little Zen Companion ("With both Eastern and Western poems, parables, haiku, and sayings, it is a serious and evocative way to view life. And each page is delightfully short"). Naturally, as she's hardly the type to be contained in a mere 26 letters, she indulges in multiple meanings for each. Perhaps the sweetest is S, which stands for Sisters ("Like DNA, we will always be joined. Winding around each other—alike and not alike").

Transgender Models of Barneys' New Catalog

Barneys New York has released its latest catalog, a weighty little publication destined for the mailboxes of the style-minded and the pages of major glossies. But there is something different — and yet increasingly normal — about the catalog for spring. The models sporting the season's finest aren't just a racially diverse bunch, a refreshing sight for the store recently accused of racial profiling. They are also transgender.

"I was so lucky to be able to photograph these transgender men and women for Barneys," - Bruce Weber. "They have more courage than any football player, explorer or astronaut combined.

Working together gave us a chance to visit a new world."

While gay rights have made significant strides of late, perception of those who've undergone gender reassignment remains largely transphobic. News of the horrific fate suffered by Islan Nettles, a transgender young woman and budding fashion designer, and the outrageous failure to prosecute the known assailant continue to resonate through the LGBT community, resulting in a rally last week outside police headquarters.

Which makes these 17 models all the more courageous, so let's meet some of them...

Valentijn de Hingh
Valentijn (a male name in her native Dutch) walked for Maison Martin Margiela and Comme des Garçons some years ago. But when she reached 6'1 (some reports claim 6'3), she was let go by her agency. Nonetheless, Valentijn has been photographed for Candy and Love magazines. Should the Zeitgeist for transgender models prove short-lived, Valentijn is one step ahead, graduating in literature science from the University of Amsterdam.

Arin Andrews & Katie Hill
These two Oklahoma teens transitioned together, but in different directions. Upon completion, they were an item for a while, amassing fans all around the world for their unusual love story. Sadly, they broke up just a few weeks ago, but have pledged to stay friends.

Ryley Pogensky
As he says on Twitter, Ryley is a "tattoo'd gender queer foodie with a love of bourbon and a serious case of Cacoethes Scribendi." When was the last time a fashion model professed, in Latin, an urge to write? Good looks and a brain to boot! For added chic, Ryley's adoptive — and clearly very supportive — grandparents also feature in the catalog.

Gisele Xtravaganza
As the name suggests, Gisele hails from the storied house of Xtravaganza, which recently celebrated 30 years of ballroom vogueing fierceness. Gisele is no newcomer to the spotlight, but this may be her most glamorous appearance yet.

Edie Charles
Born and raised in Greenwich Village, Edie is fairly new to the hormone replacement process, but says she has support from everyone around her, including her parents and her boyfriend, who's getting his PhD in gender studies. The two live in London, where Edie is studying jewelry design at Central Saint Martins and continues to model on the side.


On February 11, Barneys donated 10% of sales from its stores and Barneys.com to the National Center for Transgender Equality and the LGBT Community Center in New York. Both organizations are working with Barneys to create an employee training program on trans-related topics.

Photography>Vikram Bawa>The Yogesh Jashnani Campaign 02

Art> A Triangular Encounter

A Triangular Encounter: Nemai Ghosh, Benodebehari Mukherjee  and Satyajit Ray,
presented by 1x1 Art Gallery

Set of Black and White Photographs

Last year I was sent a set of black and white photographs by Nemai Ghosh (1936), taken during the shooting of The Inner Eye by Satyajit Ray (1921-1992). The documentary was Ray’s homage to the Bengali painter Benodebehari Mukherjee (1904-1980). On examining the set, I was unsure as to what I could say meaningfully about it.  But as I gradually delved into these photographs a story began to unravel. That story was about the taking of these pictures and what they meant to the film-maker and the painter. -  Partha Mitter

Benodebehari Mukherjee

Born as he was with weak eyesight, Benodebehari underwent an eye surgery in 1956. The operation was successful but he completely lost his eyesight due to an accident during the period of recovery. Nothing could have been more tragic for an artist at the height of his powers, but he stood up to it with characteristic stoicism.

Nemai Ghosh (b. 8 May 1934) is best known as the photo-biographer of Satyajit Ray. From 1967 to 1992, the year that Satyajit Ray passed away, he photographed every aspect of the maestro at work. Ghosh photographed the great masters Jamini Roy, Ramkinker Baij and Benodebehari Mukherjee over the years 1969 and 1970.

LIMITED EDITION BOOK

Essay  by Professor Partha Mitter

Professor Partha Mitter is Research Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex. His research focuses on connections between Indian art and national identity and he was recently awarded an AHRB research grant for a collaborative project entitled Modernity and National Identity in Art: India, Japan and Mexico, 1860s-1940s. Professor Mitter has been a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and he also lectures around the world, notably Columbia University, Princeton University, and Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Recent publications include Indian Art (Oxford University Press, 2001); Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850-1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge University Press, 1994); Much Maligned Monsters: a History of European Reactions to Indian Art, (University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Art>Pure Evil: The Nightmare Series

Pure Evil: The Nightmare Series
23 January - 28 February 2014

We are pleased to announce an exhibition of recent work by the increasingly influential artist PURE EVIL.
The exhibition consists of recently produced original work, hand-finished unique prints and limited edition prints. All of the pieces are from the artist's signature Nightmare series and available for sale.

About the Artist

In the past 5 years PURE EVIL has exhibited worldwide in China, Russia, Mongolia, Brazil, USA and all over Europe. As an 'Accidental Gallerist' he has produced over 50 different exhibitions with emerging and established artists at the Pure Evil Gallery and internationally. PURE EVIL lives and works in east London.

About the Series

“One day I received an email from Dafen - a ‘copy village’ in Guangdong province, China. The email contained thumbnails of different paintings they could reproduce for me from every famous artist in history. There were three Andy Warhol pieces in the list – a Jackie, a Liz and an Electric Chair. His whole output had been distilled to three beautiful, dark and pixelated images. 

The starting point for my series of Nightmare paintings were these 3 Warhol images. I began with an image of Liz Taylor’s hair from a Warhol painting, and mixed it up with an image of a girl I found online who dressed as a ghoulish playboy bunny one halloween. Liz died a few months later and the series gained momentum and has grown from there.”

See more works by PURE EVIL and our range of limited edition prints here. 

Preview-Pierre Joseph / Jef Geys-24.01.2014

Maintenant ('Now') It is no small feat on the part of Pierre Joseph to have indexed his works to a constantly renewed now. He does not simply take up the meaning that Walter Benjamin attributed to the dialectical image, whose 'legibility' is a function of its encounter with a 'present'1 , Joseph subverts the terms of it: it is the now, in its contextual, technological and cultural modalities, which determines the modalities of the artwork2. Although Pierre Joseph was one of the artists in the 90s involved in a redefinition of the practice and the thinking behind the work of art3 , he still persists in the undertaking.

Thus the main work in the exhibition, Endless Photographs, is a series of snapshots taken in the Normandy forest near where he lives, using one of the latest models of camera, but with no attention paid to lining up the shots, no adjustments, and using modern methods of production for printing and production (developing and framing via a web site). What he reveals with this method is a now deprived of the romantic atmosphere of all forests, and of this forest in particular, which Barbey d’Aurevilly had described in a supernatural light in his novel The Bewitched (1854).

In creating some new 'living reactivatable characters'4, after nearly ten years, Joseph seems to be applying this act of temporal redefinition to his own work. Although, at the time, he was referencing video games, the meaning is brought up to date in terms of today's digital world, and also by questions associated with the 'tableau vivant' or 're-enactment' (once again contemporary), which he re-contextualises as soon as he raises them.

Pierre Joseph seems, then, to invite us to entertain such a plasticity of meaning that he allows doubt to creep in as to whether there is any meaning at all, and the work invites one to ponder on the profundity of everyday things that he alone has understood. Looked at from this angle, his research aims less to discover anything, than to short-circuit all idea of virtuosity in order to reach this unattainable degree. As a consequence, Mon Nom est personne, the last work in the exhibition, resonates all the more.
1. "Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each "now" is the now of a particular recognizability." Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, (tr. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin) N, 3, 1, p 463.
2. In this vein the title of the catalogue raisonné of his works, Oui Non Peut-être 'Yes No Maybe' (Presses du Réel, 2011) picks up on the possible answers to invitations to Facebook events.
3. The works will be presented as such in the Stéphanie Moisdon and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster exhibition at the Centre Pompidou Metz, devoted to art of the 90s.
4. A living reactivatable character can be reactivated by an actor disguised as the character in the photograph, but the two must never be presented simultaneously.



Jef Geys's œuvre, which he began in 1947 at the age of 13, has always tended to hug the shadows, to camouflage itself and approach the categories of contemporary art from the rear.

His work is firmly anchored in autobiography; it resides in the margins of aesthetic contemplation and creates a constant dynamic somewhere between popular culture and drawing attention to the banal.

In favouring 'the world as support' and in his attempt at a synthesis of art and life, Jeff Geys (though he makes no claim to it) belongs in the tradition of Fluxus.

Since 1958 he has been making a meticulous inventory of all his works, which he orders according to subject, genre, year and number.

Out of this archive, Jef Geys extracts the themes for his new exhibitions, which are really just one way of inspecting and reactivating autobiographical events and old works in a new context that will re-energise the meaning.

At Air de Paris, Geys will be presenting two projects that closely combine official documents and personal history: 'cow passports' (les passeports de vaches) was developed in 1965 and 1966 when Jef Geys, who was helping his cattle merchant father-in-law, drew and registered the physical characteristics of the latter's cows, thus providing them with an identity.

For Air de Paris, he has created a new installation, with 21 new cow passports.

!questions de femmes! ('!women's questions!') is a series that Geys developed in the early 60s when he was a teacher of Positive Aesthetics at a children's school in Balen, where he lived in Belgium. Geys drew up a list of questions that women might ponder about their identity; then gave them to his pupils for discussion. In the 1980s these !questions de femmes! were adapted for contemporary art and have now been translated into 13 languages. The Hindi version will be on display in the Gallery shop window.

For the exhibition, a special Air de Paris edition of the newspaper KEMPENS Informatieblad will be published.

Jef Geys rejects the excessive reverence for works of art that goes on in exhibition catalogues and has been publishing the newspaper KEMPENS Informatieblad since 1971 (KEMPENS is the region of Belgium where he lives). He often produces them in line with his exhibitions.

These newspapers act as a kind of diary; they log, in no particular order, the elements necessary to understanding his surroundings, things he wonders about, things he is curious about, and his works.

Gustav Klimt-The Prince of Decadence

Looking at Klimt in a whole new light: a groundbreaking monograph

The countless events being held to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth make a clear statement to the enduring appreciation for the work of Gustav Klimt. Not that it takes such a special occasion for the press and the public to start talking about Klimt. More than two hundred articles about the artist appeared online in August 2011 alone, in comparison with barely seventy on Rembrandt within the same period. This media publicity set editor Tobias G. Natter thinking about the value of compiling the present book. During his lifetime, Klimt was a controversial star whose works made passions run high; he stood for Modernism but he also embodied tradition. His pictures polarized and divided the art-loving world. Journalists and general public alike were split over the question: For or against Klimt?