La Vie En Rose

Last Chance! Nothing to Fear But Missing Mattia Biagi's Storm of Life

Sad but true: today is your final chance to catch Mattia Biagi's "Storm of Life," a stunning installation comprising of 1,300 black umbrellas opened in all the artist's fearless glory inside the historic Merchants Bank Building in downtown Los Angeles.

Mattia, a lean Italian expat with a wicked moustache, faces the concept of superstitions, expressly those confederates of bad luck with this grand-scale installation. "Why do we invest so much in these antiquated ideas that if we open an umbrella inside or spill salt we will be doomed to bad luck—or worse?" he shared with me opening night earlier this month.

Like being drenched his sticky black tar? Mattia's best known for covering everything from teddy bears to a wedding dress to a piano in the stuff, a conceit that cannot help but imbue the observer with a kind of clausterphobic anxiety. (And they look cool, too.)

He then pointed to the first he popped, that is, the first black umbrella he popped open inside the cavernous hall. Twelve-hundred-ninety-nine umbrellas followed the process. One in the far corner is filled with a snow-like pile of heavy-grain salt, topped with the neon glow of a word spelling out "Freedom." "It's about the freedom of facing our superstitions, our fears—about not allowing them to control our destiny, our life," he remarked.

Another 76 open umbrellas are on view either inside the Art Seen Gallery on West Pico or outside of the Paul Smith flagship and Barracuda shop on Melrose Avenue and Twentieth on Beverly Boulevard. Those, too, sadly will come down soon, too.

In the collaborative spirit that Mattia and his bewitching fashion designing wife Valerj Pobega are so much about, "Storm of Life" is not relegated to the artist's concepts alone. He tapped the wonderful art video curator Paul Young to showcase the work Trine Lise Nedreaas. Her uneasy take on the stuff that scares the bejesus out of us played well among the towering heaps of open umbrellas.

One featuring an unassuming woman playing with a set of extremely long and seemingly extremely sharp knives seemed to cut through David LaChapelle, who went on about it to Paul on the sidewalk outside. Funny that the vid filled with crazy clown imagery didn't do the trick. But that's the power of superstitions and the stuff that plays on our secret fears.

The turn-out to the private fete, underwritten by Saatchi Online, was remarkable for a downtown show, too, packed with 500 of Mattia's pals such as Jon Sidel and Susan Stewart, Orlando Bloom and Miranda Kerr, Monet Mazur and hubbie Alex de Rakoff, Cheyann Benedict, Alison Burns, Henry Duarte and early Mattia champ Stefan Lawrence of Twentieth.

Artist Mattia Biagi and actress-dj Monet Mazur

A model clad in a look by the artist's wife, frock designer Valerj Pobega

Jon Sidel and Susan Stewart

Designer Valerj Pobega

Twentieth creative director Daniele Albright and owner Stefan Lawrence, an early champion of Mattia's tar-covered found objects. His Beverly Boulevard showroom is among a half dozen stores around town bedecked with open umbrellas.

 

Rock of the Ages: fashion designer—and soon, again, retailer—Henry Duarte

A cool kid (scarcely out of kindergarten) catches his shadow on one of the handful of monitors around the installation flickering the videos of artist Trine Lise Nedreaas.

 

"Storm of Life," The Merchants Bank Building, 401 S. Main Street, downtown Los Angeles. Open Noon to 4 p.m.

 

 

Tonight: My Booksigning for The Extraordinary Difference

Tonight, Tuesday, July 26, Mr. Fred Hayman and I will be signing copies of our new book, The Extraordinary Difference, at Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills, from 6:30 to 8 p.m.

Join us on Level One near the shoe salon for this Champagne mixer, celebrating Mr. Hayman and the city he helped turn into an international beacon of the gilded life.

Tell 'em Rose sent you...

Photo: Merv Griffin interviewing Fred Hayman in front of Giorgio Beverly Hills, April 1978 (Courtesy Fred Hayman Archives)

Lenny Kravitz, David LaChapelle Make the Call

It's always a kick spotting our design finds out in the world, and it was no less so receiving this image of Lenny Kravitz with a black POP! handset to ear as he walked the streets of NYC. Back in L.A., the rock star's longtime pal, Arianne Phillips, emailed us just days later with the 411 that she was with photographer David LaChapelle and he had just pulled out his own Pop!

The handsets, designed by Frenchie David Turpin for Native Union, plug into cell phones to keep harmful radiation away from brains or computers to make Skype calls more comfortable.

From these retro receivers to the sleeker, minimal options, all of Native Union's handsets top the best-seller list at A+R. And we're also thrilled to be one of only two stores in the U.S. stocking the new, shiny, limited-edition GOLD POP!

 

Ones to Watch: Artists Gordon Bowen, Bettina Hubby

From second-skin mash-ups in a downtown alley to the lyrical bronze totems installed in an Eagle Rock vault, there is much to love and covet from two of L.A.'s rising star artists, Bettina Hubby and Gordon Bowen, whose latest works made the drive out to see them worth every mile.

It's true that we count the both of them among our friends. It's also true that a) we cannot always make it to the shows of our dearest friends, regardless of their talent or how much their work thrills; b) not everyone in our wide and highly creative circle makes art that warrants any attention. So consider this posting not an endorsement to see a friend, but to experience the work of two individuals whose artwork deserves consideration.

Gordon Bowen, like many artists, had these ideas living in his noggin' for years. In his case, however, it took building a foundry of his very own to actually realize them.

"Xenotropi" at the MorYork Gallery in Eagle Rock is Gordon's first exhibition of bronze and aluminum works he poured and cast out of his workshop at his nearby home. But these are not the efforts of some amateur hobbyist. The sophisitication in both craft and execution of these pieces reflect a faculty that make these sculptures and the thought of future works so very exciting. (Yes, this is the Gordon who cast Nina's feet and hands.)

The showpiece among the six on view is a massive, mechanized mobile that involves what resembles a music box roller with pull strings on one end of the gallery endlessly rotating knobs strung with thread. The threads run upward and across the ceiling to the other gallery end where they are each anchored by a bronze form that resemble something between pants and a sharly pointed tooth. Dozens of these sculptures dangle above another series of duplicates, these single points of aluminum jutting from the concrete floor.

A smaller version of the dangling "pants" hang nearby, while the other four works are more classic in terms of composition (a sculpture on a base), but no less sublime.

Artist Gordon Bowen

 

Bettina Hubby's flights of mixed media and performance are always a trip, and they are always so much more textured than first glance allows. Two installations this month—an ongoing one in Santa Barbara and the one-night affair this past Friday night at the Post gallery in one of downtown's dingier districts—demonstrate she's on a roll.

Friday night's "Honest Mystique" show was part of the month-long "Kamikaze" series at Post, where each night the space is invaded by a different group of artists and a curator. Bettina both exhibited and curated and, with all due respect to her fellow artists, it's Bettina's work that far stood out.

Artist-curator Bettina Hubby

Collage above and its blown-up vinyl "reflection" below.

 

The stylish collages Bettina began focusing on last year were blown-up as removable vinyls, as well as duplicated as a kind of cross-hatch shadow. She fully utilized the cavernous warehouse space, plastering one of the dual images just-so from the other providing eye-bending perspective. Bettina is never terribly precious about her work, which belies the complex consideration that actually goes into it. To wit, she pulled a corner of one of the figures and ripped it off the wall, then just as quickly, slapped it back into place to show off the durability of the vinyl material.

A poke at the line drawn between commercial and fine art? In a similar spin on the notion, this weekend, Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight noted that Bettina "opted...for the tensions between public display and private interests" with her work in "Home Show, Revisted" for the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum. New works were created for private homes around the city and then open for public consumption.

Of the 10 artists invited, it's Bettina's curtains—colorfully silkscreened with images of the artist at seemingly innocent domestic tasks and covering the windows of a prosaic suburban home—that the critic most rhapsodizes about.

The review appeared Saturday, a total surprise to Bettina and everyone, and turning the already celebratory mood at Gordon's show up a notch.

A curtain view at the real life Santa Barbara home showcasing Bettina's work.

"Xenotropi" by Gordon Bowen runs through August 1 at the MorYork Gallery, 4959 York Blvd., Los Angeles (Eagle Rock), 323-348-7249.

"Home Show, Revisted" with Bettina Hubby runs through July 17 throughout Santa Barbara. Stop at the Contemporary Arts Forum space in downtown's Paseo Nuevo mall for pass and map, 805-966-5373.

All Photos by RA except image from "Home Show, Revisted," courtesy of HubbyCo.

A Last Gasp for Balenciaga

Better late than never. That was certainly the thinking when we set out after a long day in the store on Sunday evening for San Francisco, a six-hour drive north from home which ended the following morning on July 4 when we arrived inside the parking garage at the de Young Museum to catch the closing day of “Balenciaga and Spain."

It was well worth the impromptu road trip, as I'd hoped after receiving the sumptuous catalog on the show from our dear manager Rafael for my birthday in May. The breath-taking assemblage of frocks and hats inside the second floor of the de Young made it clear that Christian Dior's proclamation that his friend and fellow couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga was "master of us all" was not hyperbole.

The show was an opportunity to examine up close (well, as up close as one could get without tripping out security) what put Balenciaga among the gods of fashion: the elaborate embroidery like that covering the mantillas he grew up on; the less-is-more approach to architecturally inclined black dresses; the many, many fascinators and berets sending up the hats of matadors and other regional folk costumes; the blousy white shirts inspired by the fisherman of his home village; the ruffles, lunares and curving hemlines that evoked flamenco dancers.

Curator Hamish Bowles, Vogue's European editor at large, arranged the exhibition according to Spanish Art, Flamenco, Bullfighting, Spanish Court, Religous LIfe and Folk Dress. This installmanet was double the show that launched last year on the initiaition of Spain's Queen Sofía and imagined by Oscar de la Renta, who began his own career in fashion under Balenciaga's tutelage and invited Hamish onboard.

His arrangement isn't bad. But given the show's title, I was expecting a bit more. There was exactly one original painting that served to illustrate both the designer's penchant for modern art and how it shaped an abstraction in silhouette and shape, particularly in his last years, before he closed shop in 1968 (he died five years later at age 77). Balenciaga apparently thought he had little more to say. But it's obvious now that plenty were listening given his ideas predating the signature looks by Yves Saint Laurent, Halston and, fast forward, John Galliano, Viktor+Rolf and Tom Ford.

Balenciaga “remained forever a Spaniard…" Diana Vreeland observed once upon a time. "...the true son of a strong country filled with style, vibrant color, and a fine history."

'¡Olé!' Having just returned a couple weeks ago from Barcelona, which is less than six hours from the Basque fishing village of Getaria where the couturier's humble life began, I was moved by the references to both folk art and fine art. (I was also thrilled while in Barcelona to learn that my pal Manuel Outumuro had beautifully photographed the hefty catalog for the Balenciaga Museum in Getaria which opened last month. But more on our time with Manuel later...). Time and again, the designer found a tenor to draw from in the regional dress or dance of his native country, or a presence to riff of in the art of Velázquez or, later, Miró.

It was another Spanish painter, however, who Cecil Beaton's observation that Balenciaga was "fashion’s Picasso."

And, by the way, art's Picasso, that would be, Pablo himself, has plenty on view in a downstairs gallery at the de Young through October 9. More than 100 of the artist's works, many bonafide masterpieces and popular favorites, are on loan from the Musée National Picasso in Paris, thanks to a massive renovation there through next year.

Go. Even if you have seen the life-size bronze "Bathers" or the many portraits of wife Dora Maar or etchings such as "The Frugal Meal" (one of my long-time favorites), as Andy and I have seen before, it was no less exhilirating to see them again, live and up close.

Because whether it's the cuts in an etching or in a swath of organza, true artistry endures as fresh, stirring and powerful on the first encounter as it does the fifth or fiftieth.

(Thank you to my darling Andy for initiating the family field trip!)