Innehållsförteckning för Volume 6, 2025 från W Magazine

Darius Khondji (left) and Philippe Parreno Cinematographer and Director, “Jennifer Lawrence” (page 144) Which filmmakers, living or dead, do you wish you could work with? DK: Michelangelo Antonioni, Stanley Kubrick.  What’s your favorite opening scene of a movie? DK: Touch of Evil. What’s a medium you haven’t yet worked in but would like to? PP: I’d like to work with biological matter—with DNA, bacteria, or plants—not as metaphors but as time-based materials. I’ve always been drawn to systems that evolve on their own, that continue to transform long after we stop observing them. The idea of writing directly into life’s code is fascinating, not for its scientific novelty but for its temporal scale. Which artist, living or dead, do you wish you could collaborate with? PP: Andrei Tarkovsky, without hesitation.…

In 1977, Mary Boone paid about $1,700 a month to rent a gallery space in SoHo to show relatively unknown artists. Within a few years, her eponymous gallery and the artists she championed, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, and David Salle, had ushered in a new creative era. Known as a no-nonsense dealmaker, Boone cultivated difficult geniuses, wooed pedigreed collectors, and accumulated a closetful of Chanel. But in 2018, after four decades in the art world, she was suddenly embroiled in scandal. Boone was convicted of tax fraud, forced to close her two galleries, and served 13 months in prison. She kept a low profile after her release, but that didn’t last long. In 2024, the band Vampire Weekend released a single titled “Mary Boone.” “[Lead singer] Ezra Koenig called…

The Cady Noland exhibition at Gagosian’s Chelsea gallery this fall was a nightmare for a security professional. The reclusive sculptor often incorporates found objects in her installations, and she is notoriously prickly about how they are placed. In this case, she had covered the gallery’s floor with gargantuan black and white prints and equipment that could have been lifted from a construction site: pipes, white crates, trash cans, and street barricades. Andre Headley and Anthony Johnson, Gagosian’s heads of security, often had to reroute visitors. “Be careful,” Johnson said, as he and Headley steered me through the exhibition on a Tuesday morning. “There’s artwork on the floor.” “These chairs weren’t really part of the show,” Headley said, nodding at two gray desk chairs tucked by a display table. “But Cady…

On a September afternoon, the art dealer Felix Rödder is sitting in his gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a week before his first opening, naming some notable gallerists he admires. They include Heinz Berggruen, Pierre Matisse, and Yvon Lambert—people who had “these beautiful spaces that felt like you were really let in on a treat,” he says. Rödder’s first treat of his own is a solo show by the midcareer artist Wyatt Kahn, whose alluring paintings suggest abstract stained-glass windows, though they’re built with translucent vinyl. The five on view take up most of the 450-square-foot exhibition space at Rodder (no umlaut), on the fifth floor of a stately townhouse. Downstairs is the Old Masters dealer Robert B. Simon, who acquired Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi at a New…

Since the 1980s, you’ve been considered a hero of American independent cinema. Your tenderly funny new film, Father Mother Sister Brother, which you both wrote and directed, tells three different stories about grown-up siblings and their parents, with an ensemble cast that includes Adam Driver, Cate Blanchett, Tom Waits, Vicky Krieps, and Indya Moore. What made you want to explore the complex kinds of love and understanding—and misunderstanding—in families? Well, I started with “Gee, it’d be cool if Tom Waits was Adam Driver’s father.” Parents are not honest with their children for various reasons: They want to protect their own boundaries, or be a guide to them, or conceal things about themselves. In the first chapter, the son [Driver] needs love from his father [Waits] so much that he allows…

When we started planning our annual Art Issue, I discussed with a friend in the art world who our dream collaborators would be for three outstanding covers. The artists we talked about—the painter Elizabeth Peyton, the multimedia artist Philippe Parreno, and the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans—are masters in their fields, but not exactly easy to pin down. To my surprise and delight (I’m still pinching myself), all of them agreed to work with the unparalleled Jennifer Lawrence, capturing very different facets of her personality. I have always been a fan of Lawrence’s work, in films as diverse as Winter’s Bone, Silver Linings Playbook, and The Hunger Games. In person, she’s so relatable that it’s easy to forget what a big deal she is; as Sean Penn said in a podcast earlier…

The designer Meruert Tolegen likes to hide symbols in her clothes: floral prints with discreet ghosts; figures that look like swans but, upon closer inspection, turn out to be women with bird bodies. “There’s a weirdness to it, but a good weirdness,” the 34-year-old designer tells me, sitting in her first-ever boutique, on Wooster Street, in New York’s SoHo. The shop, which had a soft opening in the fall, is full of dark wood, earthen sculptures, and Tolegen’s Mary Shelley–esque designs: clothes with lots of ruffles, eyelets, and tulle, mostly in black or ivory. Her atelier is housed there too. Starting her brand four years ago was “accidental,” says Tolegen. She studied math and physics in college, first at the University of California, Davis, and then at CUNY, in New…

“I have a fascination with these people that’s a little like being in love,” says Louise Sartor of the subjects she chose for the portraits you see here. W asked the French artist to depict creative peers wearing fashion from the latest collections. Sartor started out by photographing them, then fused full-frame and detail shots into compositions that she completed in her live-work studio. This was the first time Sartor shot so many subjects in a single day, and the first time she used a stylist. “Normally, I paint people in their own clothes, but this was a little like playing with dolls,” she says. She explains that when she knows her sitters well, she develops a “multiple vision of them” and is tempted to make them overly pretty, loading…

Her films have grossed more than $6 billion worldwide. She won the Academy Award for best actress at 22 (the second-youngest winner in that category) and holds the Guinness World Records title of highest-grossing action heroine in movie history. In May, she received a Peabody Award. Yet accolades make up only a fraction of who Jennifer Lawrence really is. For W’s Art Issue, three masters of their craft—the American painter Elizabeth Peyton, the French multimedia artist Philippe Parreno, and the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans—conceive of Lawrence, 35, as a work of art unto herself. Painting, film, and photography are woven together into a three-part portfolio exploring the intersection of intimacy and image. Seated at one of the many cafés on Manhattan’s West Side for our interview, Lawrence wore a red…

Chanel’s new high jewelry collection, Reach for the Stars, resurrects the house’s brief but blazing flirtation with Tinseltown. Like Hollywood itself, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel thrived on fiction—her most cherished invention was that her absent father had sailed to America in search of fortune. The United States became a lodestar for her, beckoning with the prospect of another life. When Chanel finally crossed the Atlantic in 1931, aboard the SS Europa, she brought with her an associate, two assistants, three maids, two models, 15 trunks, and 35 pieces of luggage—a retinue fit for a film star. Hollywood was waiting. Studio mogul Samuel Goldwyn had offered her $1 million a year to dress his leading ladies, convinced that Chanel’s Parisian modernity would lure women to movie theaters. The designer arrived in Los…

Last year, global art market sales declined by 12%. 69% of art collectors say a lack of transparency—about prices, provenance, and additional information—has kept them from buying art. Only 5% of surveyed collectors say the art market is “completely” transparent. In October, bidding for Joan Rivers’s signed George H.W. Bush headshot started at $25. It ultimately sold for $1,920. The actor Adrien Brody sold one of his original paintings for $425,000.  23% of Brits think memes can be considered art. 77% of Americans think they could replicate Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow, by Piet Mondrian. 33% of American adults say they’ve been to a museum in the past year. For museums, the median cost of accommodating a single visitor is $82. 27% of Brits would not like to see…

As a child, the artist Caroline Zurmely turned nail polish bottles into dolls. “I put scrunchies on them and lined them up,” she says. “Their personalities just felt inherent. The miniature-size ones would be kindergartners. The taller bottles would be teachers—the dark green one would be the mean teacher.” She used her three-tiered bathroom cabinet as a dollhouse. Now the 31-year-old paints with her old toys. After graduating in 2017 from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied painting—the conventional kind, with oils and acrylics—Zurmely experimented with unusual materials, such as sawdust, paper pulp, and stiffened vintage towels. They had many limitations. Take the towels: She’d apply fabric stiffener, then flick up the fibers to create tones and shadows, but this required finishing every piece in a single…

“I wanted long necks, big eyes, a good profile,” says the artist Mark Leckey, talking about the models in this story, his first fashion project for a magazine. He was searching for the kinds of faces that might have fit into paintings from one of his favorite historical periods, “just before the Renaissance,” when Italian artists such as Giotto were, he says, “moving from Byzantine icons to sort of early realism.” Giotto lived in Florence in the late Middle Ages, and Leckey is excited to note that one of the models is Florentine too. “He looks like a kind of angel,” he says. “I always had this expectation that models were not going to be that luminous in real life, but they are. It’s like, the closer you get to…