Sandra‘s Closet

At this year’s Paris+ par Art Basel, Louis Vuitton continues its longstanding commitment to the arts by exhibiting and showcasing a curated selection of creative collaborations and original artworks from leading international artists. The Maison is also revealing wave five of the Artycapucines collection.

The Louis Vuitton booth for Paris+ par Art Basel 2023, which runs from 20-22 October at the Grand Palais Éphémère, has been designed to resemble an oversized Louis Vuitton trunk. The exterior of the booth is inspired by the Copper Malle Courrier by Pharrell Williams, which was presented on the runway for his debut Louis Vuitton menswear collection, for S/S 2024. The booth’s interior walls feature the iconic malletage pattern, the refined crisscrossing motif that has padded the inside of the Maison’s trunks since Louis Vuitton founded his business in 1854. The booth is the perfect showcase for an exhibition of curated works by an ensemble of world-renowned artists, including collaborations on bags and canvas by Takashi Murakami; reworked, unique travel trunks by Damien Hirst; and Stephen Sprouse‘s Roses Monogram Alma bag.

Other original artworks on show include three paintings by Richard Prince; one by Takashi Murakami; a circular portrait of a young Louis Vuitton by Yan Pei-Ming; and an AI-data painting entitled Finding LV by Refik Anadol. Also included are seven new works by Yayoi Kusama, exhibited for the first time, each entitled Every Day I Pray for Love. The phrase has featured on the back of Kusama’s recent paintings, including this new series, which was begun in 2022 during the conception of the artist’s latest collaboration with Louis Vuitton.

At Paris+ par Art Basel, the Maison will also reveal five additions to its now iconic Artycapucines Collection. Since 2019, the collection has seen leading international artists – including Daniel Buren, Urs Fischer, Donna Huanca, Vik Muniz, Park Seo-Bo, Tschabalala Self, Kennedy Yanko, and Zhao Zhao – bring their unique creative visions to the blank canvas offered by the Capucines bag’s modern classic design. The five new bags on display at Paris+ par Art Basel are by Ewa Juszkiewicz, Liza Lou, Tursic & Mille, Ziping Wang, and Billie Zangewa, and reveal the ingenious creativity of their artist designers and the creative ingenuity of Louis Vuitton’s artisans who turned those visions into reality.

In 2023, following its successful presence at last year’s inaugural Paris+ par Art Basel, Louis Vuitton is now proud to become a global Associate Partner of Art Basel.
This additional support further confirms the Maison’s close and committed relationship to the arts, one that started nearly a century ago when Gaston-Louis Vuitton, the founder’s grandson, began commissioning artists to collaborate with Louis Vuitton on advertisements and perfume bottles.

Since 1988, Louis Vuitton has continued this legacy by collaborating with some of the biggest names in modern art and design, including Sol LeWitt, James Rosenquist, Cesar, and Olafur Eliasson. It has curated exhibitions by artists such as Sophie Calle,Dan Flavin, Alberto Giacometti and Gerhard Richter in its Espaces Louis Vuitton around the world (Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul and Osaka), and has more recently created innovative large-scale global art projects, such as the 2022 collaboration with Yayoi Kusama that included giant statues of the artist in Paris and London, an anamorphic billboard in Tokyo, and a capsule collection of bags, shoes, accessories, luggage, and fragrances. In 2014, the Maison opened the landmark Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, which further strengthened its continuing mission to bring the best modern and contemporary art to new audiences.

Louis Vuitton will present during Paris+ par Art Basel, which runs 20 – 22 October 2023 at the Grand Palais Éphémère, 2 Place Joffre, 75007 Paris, France.
From 13 October, the Louis Vuitton City Guide app will feature a new Contemporary Art «flânerie» – or stroll route – which will include a stop at Paris+ par Art Basel.

LoL, Sandra

Photos: © Louis Vuitton
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On November 9 and 10, 2022 Prada will present the eighth iteration of Prada Mode in Dubai featuring an installation by artist Damien Hirst. A traveling social club with a focus on contemporary culture, Prada Mode provides members with a unique art experience along with music, dining, and conversations.

In Dubai, Prada Mode will feature a new edition of Pharmacy by Damien Hirst, following the iteration presented at Prada Mode Moscow in 2021. Hirst created the Pharmacy restaurant in Notting Hill, London in 1998, six years after the inaugural installation of the same name at the Cohen Gallery New York. Pharmacy was conceived as a fully functioning restaurant and bar in an installation of Hirst’s floor- to-ceiling medicine cabinets, and specially made butterfly paintings. Hirst designed furniture, architectural details such as a huge molecular model in its window, light boxes, and a wallpaper design taken from a catalogue of prescription medicine. It is fitting for this to be made especially for Prada Mode: the artist’s long-time friend Miuccia Prada designed the staff uniforms for the original restaurant.

«I’m thrilled and honoured to be invited by Miuccia Prada to recreate Pharmacy for Prada Mode in Dubai after our successful collaboration in Moscow,» said the Damien Hirst. «I’m working really hard with a complicated but beautiful space, ICD Brookfield Place, to create harmony between the inside and outside of the new building. Once again, Prada have found a space that will provide the perfect place for it.
I’m so excited to be doing this! I’ve always thought great restaurants can be seen as art, and art without the evidence as we always remember great meals on great evenings with great people in great places and in this way Pharmacy is definitely a kinetic artwork, that works best filled with people and art existing and living and breathing and eating and drinking and enjoying themselves as one.»

For Prada Mode Dubai, Damien Hirst will transform a dedicated space at the landmark ICD Brookfield Place, the newest landmark building in Dubai designed by Foster + Partners. The building has become a lifestyle and business destination and home to some of the world’s leading corporations and an array of high-end restaurants and bars, representing the development of a cultural epicentre in the heart of Dubai International Financial Centre district (DIFC).
On November 9 and 10, early access to the club will be available for members to participate in morning and afternoon panels and discussions as well as nightly events, sampling specialty cocktails and dining throughout.

LoL, Sandra

Photos: ©Prada
DISCLOSURE: We may earn commission from links on this page, but I only recommend products I love. Promise!

On 12 and 13 of November, Prada will present the sixth iteration of Prada Mode at the Levenson Mansion in Moscow featuring an installation by artist Damien Hirst. A traveling social club with a focus on contemporary culture, Prada Mode provides members with a unique art experience along with music, dining, and conversations.

Pharmacy exterior © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2012

For Prada Mode Moscow, Damien Hirst will transform the historic building with his installation, Pharmacy. Hirst created Pharmacy restaurant in Notting Hill, London in 1998, six years after the inaugural installation of the same name at the Cohen Gallery New York.

Pharmacy was conceived as a fully functioning restaurant and bar in an installation of Hirst’s floor-to-ceiling medicine cabinets, and specially made butterfly paintings. Hirst designed furniture, architectural details such as a huge molecular model in its window, light boxes, and a wallpaper design taken from a catalogue of prescription medicine.

© Tate, London 2012 © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2012

In Moscow, Hirst will present the third iteration of Pharmacy restaurant, the second being installed at his Newport Street Gallery, London. It is fitting for this to be made especially for Prada Mode: the artist’s long-time friend Miuccia Prada designed the staff uniforms for the original restaurant.

«I’m so excited to be invited by Miuccia to recreate Pharmacy for Prada Mode in Moscow,» said the artist. «I’m pulling out all of the stops to make this amazing, and the four floors of the historic Levenson building will provide the perfect place for it. I can’t wait to get going! I’ve always thought great restaurants can be art, and Pharmacy is a living breathing artwork, best filled with people and art as one.»

One of the most extravagant houses in Moscow… Levenson Mansion.

The Levenson Mansion is a private residence on Moscow’s Patriarch Ponds. The Art Nouveau landmark was designed by architect Fyodor Shechtel in 1900 for the A.A. Levenson Skoroprinting Company, an official purveyor of his majesty Emperor Nicholas II’s Imperial Court.

Last year, Fondazione Prada and Damien Hirst came together in aid of Save The Children.

Prada Mode Moscow will welcome members to access the club at any time over the course of the two-day project to participate in morning and afternoon panels and discussions as well as nightly events featuring exhilarating performances and live music, sampling specialty cocktails and dining throughout. Pharmacy installation will then open to the public from November 14th to 20th 2021.

LEVENSON MANSION
9, TRYOKHPRUDNY LANE
MOSCOW
NOV 12–13 2021

Update on October 21, 2021: Due to today’s news, please be informed that the Prada Mode Moscow event is now postponed. The new dates will be announced soon.

LoL, Sandra

Photos: © Prada and © Damian First if not stated otherwise

Welcome to the ​Empathy Suite, a Sky Villa designed by and featuring the works of world-renowned artist Damien Hirst. The artist has collaborated with Bentel & Bentel Architects to design the world’s most expensive hotel room. If you are looking for some for Instagram-worthy moment and you have a spare $100.000 per night, it’s your place to stay at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. Sin City has a reputation for excess, and the nearly $690 million renovation of the hotel has also filled it with a huge amount of impressive artwork, including works by Takashi Murakami, KAWS, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and, of course, Hirst.

Once you pass through the gilded doors, you’re met with a 13-foot-long tiger shark that has been trisected into three tanks of formaldehyde, lofted above bottles of top-shelf spirits – Hirst’s first bar project in the United States, featuring the fierce sculpture titled The Unknown (Explored, Explained, Exploded).

The 836-square-meters two-story sky villa sits on top of the Palms and is the first and only of «its kind featuring a collection of contemporary art at this scale.» It’s an eclectic mix of blue-chip and street art that rarely mingles under one roof. With many original pieces from some of Hirst’s most notable series, a custom butterfly-motif mosaic tiled cantilevered pool overlooking the Las Vegas Strip and Venus gray marble featured throughout the villa, it will surely attract lots of celebrities – especially after the announcement that they’ll be holding a three-night festival for the anticipated opening of the KAOS nightclub, featuring the likes of Cardi B, Skrillex, and Travis Scott, with additional performances by Alicia Keys and Hozier at their Pearl Theater.

And if you were wondering where the name Empathy Suite derives from…. , because Hirst wants you «to feel empathy when you’re in it; empathy with all your friends wherever they are and whether you’re with them or not and to feel empathy when you’re spending the night with them in the suite and empathy with the whole world the morning after.»

LoL, Sandra

Photos: © Palms Casino Resort

STEPHEN WEBSTER

The famous jeweler lived in many different countries, among them Canada and the United States. Till this day, he enjoys travelling very much, but always comes back happily to his hometown: London. Below you will find his tips for the best places to visit in Great Britain’s capital.

Your favourite city in the world: 
LONDON

Your favourite restaurants: I am actually in this business as well and own three restaurants. 

HIX, 66-70 Brewer Street  City of Westminster, W1F 9UP,
+44 20 7292 3518
(Favourite dish: Webster’s fish fingers, fish & chips)
HIX BELGRAVIA, Pont Street, London SW1X 9EJ, +44 20 3189 4850
TRAMSHED, 32 Rivington Street, London EC2A 3LX, +44 20 7749 0478
It’s just opened in Shoreditch, which is the real trendy place for London. The menu primarily focuses on steak and chicken items. Greeting guests and reminding them of this fact is the spectacularly placed Cock and Bull piece from Damian Hirst created specifically for us.

Your favourite hotel: 
CLARIDGE’S, 49 Brook Street, Mayfair, London, +44 20 7629 8860.

Your favourite shop: SELFRIDGES
I especially love the food department.

Your favourite nightclub: 
THE WELLINGTON, 116A Knightsbridge  London SW1X 7PL, 
+ 44 20 7823 8211
I don’t hardly ever go to nightclubs anymore. If I do go to a nightclub, I go to the Wellington, which it’s the place where I know everybody, I know the DJ, and that’s probably what I’m looking for right now.

Your favourite art gallery: TATE MODERN, Bankside London SE1 9TG, +44 20 78878752

Your favourite park: HYDE PARK
I live right next to it and walk across it nearly every morning.

Your favourite transportation in London: THE TUBE
I use the tube, because if you don’t you’re going to get very frustrated. My motorbike, I keep at the country.

Thank you, Stephen, for sharing your insider scoop on London with us!

LoL, Sandra

The reason for my trip to Milan this week was the opening of “O’Clock – time design, design time” with Officine Panerai as the main partner. The exhibition is curated by Silvana Annicchiarico and Jan van Rossem, with a special exhibition design by Patricia Urquiola that analyses the relationship between the concept of time and design, on display at Milan Triennale from 11th October 2011 to 8th January 2012.

The works on show describe the way in which  some 80 international designers and artists have interpreted or represented one of the fundamental themes of our culture, that of time.

Patricia Urquiola has also created for Officine Panerai the installation “I mondi di Officine Panerai” (The worlds of Officine Panerai), presented here for the first time, in which eight watch models recount, as protagonists, the design of Panerai. The installation, positioned at the end of the exhibition, is open from 11th to 23rd October and consists of eight models in as many display cases, in which the watches are presented in a setting that skilfully blends humour and poetry and create the effect of a time tunnel which appears to possess a soul, that of time.

If the link between the concept of time and a brand of high-end timepieces is obvious and immediate, the same can be said of the connection between Panerai and the world of design. The Radiomir and Luminor, created in the 1930s and 1940s for the Italian Navy frogmen commandos, have become icons of fine watch-making since their launch in the 1990s.

Damien Hirst, Beautiful Sunflower Panerai Painting

On the occasion of the exhibition the famous British artist Damien Hirst is premiering two works, made using the spin painting technique and using dials from Panerai watches and household gloss on canvas: Beautiful Sunflower Panerai Painting and Beautiful Fractional Sunflower Panerai Painting.

“I love Panerai”, declared the British artist. “The watches are timeless and I made this spin painting using black Panerai watch faces without hands in the pattern of the seeds in the head of a sunflower – I hope the painting makes you think, we are here for a good time, not a long time.”

Damien Hirst, Beautiful Fractional Sunflower Panerai Painting
© 2011 Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved DACS, 
Photos: by Prudence Cuming Associates

By the way, Damien Hirst has included Panerai watches on several occasions in the past in his works: a Panerai watch is painted on a table next to medicines and a skull in “Skull with Watch” from 2005 and is physically present in the installations “The Tranquility of Solitude (for George Dyer)” (2006), and “Killing Time” (2008).

Gomitolo Clock
Carlo e Benedetta Tamborini
Diamantini & Domeniconi, 2008
courtesy Diamantini & Domeniconi

A cotton-knit cover; almost as if to suggest a subtle link between the technique of measuring time and the art of weaving.

One of my favourite art works is the following, created with different pieces of furniture:

The bug – Time Machine
Patricia Urquiola
site-specific, 2011

Time has always been an obsession for humanity in that it is the least controllable and modifiable element. The strongest limit to be overcome and on which technology and progress can intervene least of all. Dealing with our being limited, with a deadline, which we can try to extend, but not avoid. Dealing with eternity and the impossibility of experiencing it. The curiosity of being able to foresee or read the future, the primary search of every civilization, which perpetuates itself in continuous unlikely and unfound attempts, based on foundations comparable to beliefs. Power linked to a supposed control of time, by means of forecasts, surveys, readings, premonitions, the study of cycles, the creation of systems, genetic analysis, preventative tests, séances, oracles, reading of cards, bones, animal guts, the hand, the stars. To be able to make money on the stock market, to know society’s moods, the opinions of the decision-makers, to create consensus, prevent, anticipate, control. The final solution? Invent a time machine just like the train, the car, the airplane and the spaceship were invented.
Further and further away, faster and faster, in less time, but always and only in the present and space.
The bug is a worm, an insect, something unforeseen, an error, an act of nature or something artificial, like a metaphor for the impossibilty of total control of time.

Patricia Urquiola

Patricia Urquiola in front of her time machine

Patricia Urquiola with me

Poster Plants
Oscar Diaz
2011
courtesy Oscar Diaz

A piece of white paper with a paper tree with branches and a vase filled with green paint. The special material used to make the poster causes the green paint to be absorbed at regular intervals by the branches, so that the plant can „grow“ in the space of a few months.

Domino
Albin Karlsson
2005
courtesy Albin Karlsson

Dominoes arranged into the symbol of infinity fall one after the other in a chain reaction, to then rise again as if controlled by an invisible hand, ad infinitum.

Clock
Christiaan Postma
2008 
courtesy Christiaan Postma

At 3:00 on the clock’s right side, the word THREE will appear, fading out as time passes; then, at about 3:30, the word FOUR will slowly begin to emerge.

Eternity
Alicia Eggert, Mike Fleming
2010
courtesy Alicia Eggert & Mike Fleming

30 clocks and 36 black hands for the hours and the minutes move so as to form the word Eternity every 12 hours and only for a few secons on a white acrylic panel.

Givenchy
Riccardo Tisci
2011
courtesy of Sandra Bauknecht

This one was a little joke…got you? But sometimes clothes are pieces of art.
My look for the exhibition opening: Black and white dress and ruffled jacket with zipper detail by Givenchy, suede pumps by Yves Saint Laurent, stay-ups “Bonny Dots” by Wolford and cocktail ring by Dior Haute Joaillerie.

“Life can only be understood backwards; but must be lived forwards” – Sören Kierkegaard

LoL, Sandra

Suryia Hill to the right with me, Photos: © Sandra Bauknecht