Innehållsförteckning för Volume 6, 2024 från W Magazine

Robert Longo Photographer, “Woman in the City” (page 142) If you could own any artwork, what would you choose and why? Mark Rothko’s No. 14, 1960. Rothko’s paintings carry so much mystery, leading us beyond their surface, beyond the physical realm. They feel like pictures of god, a pursuit of the sublime. What artwork do you wish you had made? Roni Horn’s glass drums. They just have an incredible, almost otherworldly presence. I also wish I had made Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. It’s one of the most brutal, dynamic, and important historical paintings. Nancy Durrant Writer, “Seeing Is Believing” (page 88) What’s the one piece of art everyone needs to see in person? Anything by Vincent van Gogh—otherwise you get absolutely no sense of how miraculously he…

Modern Maximalists Leading Ladies Frequent Fliers Nonconformists Home Buddies Beach Bums Heavenly Hosts…

Drake Carr, a Christian boy from a tiny Michigan suburb a few miles outside of Flint, moved to New York City in 2015 because “this is where you move if you want to be an artist.” Like many before him, he paid rent by bartending. Carr found a job at Happyfun Hideaway, a tiki-themed gay bar in Bushwick where draft margaritas come out of a blue poodle. On the wood panels around the space and in the bathroom, he painted cartoonish figures: shirtless guys with bloated biceps, dudes wearing denim micro-shorts. Before Carr moved to New York, he met Pvssyheaven, a musician and performance artist, through a close friend. They ended up moving to Brooklyn and bartending together every Friday night for about three years. Macy Rodman—a musician, podcaster, and…

NICOLE KIDMAN, dressed in a slim black pantsuit, white shirt, and high-heeled pumps, was in a cluttered Chelsea loft carefully studying images created by the artist Robert Longo for his early-1980s masterwork “Men in the Cities.” “I like this one,” she said, fixating on a woman in a white dress with a full skirt, her body twisting away from the viewer. “You can see her abandon and determination in that moment.” She smiled. “I’m always fascinated by complicated emotions.” In her latest film, Babygirl, Kidman plays a woman who is overwhelmed by her sexual desires. Happily married and the mother of two teenage children, her character finds herself inexorably drawn to a much younger intern in her office, played by Harris Dickinson, after she happens to see him gently calm…

Hauser & Wirth, the gallery that you and your husband, Iwan Wirth, jointly run, is a global juggernaut. You grew up in the Swiss countryside. Did you inherit a passion for artists from your mother, Ursula Hauser, who collected art while working full-time after the premature death of your father? I was born a collector. As a child, I collected seashells, stones, precious things I found outdoors. Then I fell in love with textiles, and I started collecting embroideries and wool. You started out teaching arts and crafts, cooking, and home economics to children in a village school. How did you shift into the art business? I was working part-time in my mother’s small gallery, where she organized shows with local artists. When my mother began partnering with Iwan Wirth,…

42% of art sales by value last year were in the U.S., 19% were in China, 17% were in the U.K., and 7% were in France. 88% of high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) buy art through dealers, 67% through auctions, 41% through fairs, and 11% through advisers. $150,780 was the average amount an actively buying HNWIs spent on fine art in the first half of 2024. $51,520 was on luxury sneakers, and $66,255 was on luxury handbags. 26% was the decrease in sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Phillips, and Bonhams from the first half of 2023 to the first half of 2024. 32% of lots at the May marquee auctions sold for less than their low estimates. $50 million was the high estimate at Sotheby’s for Francis Bacon’s 1966 painting Portrait of George…

The first thing you see when you walk into Lyndon J. Barrois Sr. and Janine Sherman Barrois’s house in L.A.’s Lafayette Square is a pair of paintings by Kehinde Wiley and Henry Taylor, icons of contemporary Black portraiture. From there, the couple’s art collection spans every nook of their multiplestructure compound. Works are hung salon-style in narrow hallways and even on the ceiling, as is the case with the enormous Shantell Martin drawing mounted above the living room. “Every time we think we don’t have any more wall space, our installer comes by and finds it,” says Lyndon, gesturing toward a painting they’ve hung directly over a window. “A lot of people have blank walls because there’s this idea that your eyes should rest,” adds Janine. “We would disagree.” Janine,…

The Mexican artist Bárbara Sánchez-Kane started out as a fashion designer—albeit a highly unconventional one. Her gender-bending collections, shown at New York, Los Angeles, and Mexico City fashion weeks over the past decade, questioned the very nature of luxury consumption: They were assembled from unexpected materials (think stilettos with toy metal shopping carts for heels) and incorporated sly architectural details (suit jackets featuring seductive cutouts, jeans with plunging pockets meant for carrying flowers). Then, in 2019, Sánchez-Kane had a chance encounter with the British sculptor Sarah Lucas, who introduced her to José Kuri and Mónica Manzutto, the power couple behind the Mexican gallery Kurimanzutto. Since then, the 37-year-old punk provocateur has been ascending to the highest climes of the international art scene. Her Prêt-à-Patria sculpture—a human centipede of life-size mannequins…

The noon sky is overcast on another muggy day during Tokyo’s long late summer, and the crew for today’s shoot is snaking at a brisk pace through the packed streets of Shibuya neighborhood in single file, struggling to keep up with the boss: the sprightly photographer Takashi Homma. They easily spot him within the human crush of tourists and workers on their lunch break thanks to his bright white baseball hat, perched atop a full head of white hair. Homma zips along the streets, miraculously finding empty spots to set up his clunky tripod and oldtimey Linhof medium-format camera. A guerilla production with a handheld digital camera might have seemed a lot less burdensome, but Homma assures me, “It’s easier to do it this way. When you’re snapping away on…

Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel contained multitudes. Her shadow has loomed large in the fashion world for more than a century—and for good reason. Despite the attempts of various biographers, her legacy defies easy categorization. An underprivileged orphan who rose to become an imperious aristocrat of the mind, she helped create the template for ladylike dressing; but her designs also liberated women from the constraints of the corsets and underpinnings that prevailed before her. “I gave women back their bodies,” she once said. Fittingly, this confounding lodestar of ultrafeminine chic, who passed away in 1971, was also somewhat of a jock. An adept equestrian, the young Chanel scandalized polite society when she began riding horses astride—a pursuit previously reserved for men—and she debuted a “sport” atelier within her haute couture house circa…

No matter how high the thermometer climbs in L.A., Ron Finley never fills his backyard swimming pool with water. The fashion designer turned artist and urban gardener—he’s famous for an early TED Talk warning that “drive-throughs are killing more people than drive-bys”—instead keeps his pool filled with a wide variety of potted plants, which have their own cooling effect. There are mulberry and mango trees, succulents and herbs, alongside signs proclaiming integrity and power, making for a lush case study in how to grow food in unused spaces. These days, another, more politically pointed version of Finley’s urban garden is growing at the Hammer Museum. Toward the front stands a large wooden sign from “Redline Realty” blasting the history of white land grabs: su casa es mi casa! Deeper in,…

Carmen Winant is an institutional darling. Museums love the 41-year-old Ohio-based artist because she addresses difficult subjects like domestic violence, but is also able to find beauty in the communities that come together to tackle those issues. Her breakout moment came in 2018, when she stole the show at MoMA’s biannual “New Photography” exhibition with My Birth, an installation that transformed a hallway of the museum into a monument to the labor of childbirth. Unlike typically idealized celebrations of motherhood, Winant’s piece didn’t shy away from the violence that delivering a baby entails. The more than 2,000 images were culled from women’s health magazines, pamphlets stowed away in nonprofit archives, and other sources documenting everything from crowning heads covered in blood to peacefully sleeping mothers with babies on their breasts.…

It was only in 2019 that Mohamed Bourouissa started shooting fashion—with a campaign for Louis Vuitton Men’s, which was then helmed by Virgil Abloh—but the elements of style have been a central concern for him since the start of his career. From 2002 through 2003, the Algeria-born, France-raised multidisciplinary artist made portraits of strangers in the Châtelet–Les Halles area in Paris, a major congregation point for youth from working-class and immigrant suburbs—and therefore a hub of street style. His artistic lodestar was Jamel Shabazz, the great photographer of New York City’s hip-hop heyday. But Bourouissa had personal experience with his subjects too: He had grown up in Courbevoie, one such immigrant banlieue, and had run with graffiti crews. A tragic news event in 2005 propelled Bourouissa in a new direction.…