A Decade of L'OFFICIEL Art

For a century L’OFFICIEL has considered art and culture to be the context for every fashion creation. Here, you could find not only every trend in fashion, but also the work of the major artists of the time— from Salvador Dalí to David Hockney. Ten years ago, to celebrate the new energy at the intersection of art and fashion in contemporary culture, L’OFFICIEL Art was born as a distinct stand-alone publication. We are proud to continue this long standing commitment and carry on the mission of connecting art and fashion.

Each art magazine is a vision of the world. Like a seismograph, it tries to seize its pulse, to catch its most daring dimensions as well as its darker. This vision is always subjective, given that it is from the perspective of its founders. Benjamin Eymere and Victoire de Pourtalès are the two minds behind L’OFFICIEL Art, which began 10 years ago. Sharing the same sensibility, they created a publication whose ambition was to show the art world in the most universal way. Be it through the eyes of artists, choreographers, museum directors, curators,thinkers, collectors, or simply art lovers, the magazine creates a kaleidoscopic vision of the world. Its modus operandi offers a platform for conversations across various—and sometimes conflicting—disciplines, places, and times.

In the first issue, released in April 2012, the enfant terrible of the Swiss Art scene, Urs Fischer, discussed radically changing our understanding of sculpture with the young Darren Bader. The September 2012 issue featured a conversation between the French punk-art wunderkind Cyprien Gaillard and skateboard legend Mark Gonzales that covered everything from the Venice Beach skate scene to Mark Rothko. For the seventh issue, in September 2013, French ballet dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied, who is the founder of the LA Dance Project, spoke to the Pictures Generation icon, Barbara Kruger, about working together on the performative exhibition, Reflections Redux. In the same issue, French artist, Loris Gréaud, known for his apocalyptic, immersive installations, discussed occultism and cinema with the decadent and experimental LA filmmaker, Kenneth Anger. For the eighth edition, the French designer, art collector, and producer, Agnès b. opened the door of her imaginary museum that showed photos by Diane Arbus alongside paintings by Titian. Throughout the years, L’OFFICIEL Art featured recurring figures, such as Maurizio Cattelan, the art world’s professional prankster, who had his own column in which he championed emerging talents from Wyatt Kahn to David Douard. To mark the 10th anniversary of L’OFFICIEL Art,we have chosen 10 covers or projects that symbolize how the arts have played such an important role in our changing times.

The first issue of a magazine always feels like a manifesto. What could be more representative of L’OFFICIEL Art’s purpose than the project created by Francesco Vezzoli for the magazine’s inaugural issue? Based on the 24-hour museum the artist created in collaboration with Prada and architect, Rem Koolhaas, at Palais d'Iéna in Paris, the project invited the reader into Vezzoli’s kaleidoscopic mind. Through a series of collages, Vezzoli gave the reader a glimpse into his delirious museum: part Salon des Refusés, part surrealist dinner sprinkled with a dash of Viscontinian drama.

For their cover collaboration, performance-art stars, Terence Koh and Marina Abramović, wanted to create something that reflected a return to a simpler existence after the excess and futurist speculations associated with the 2000s. As impending ecological danger became more clear, the duo sought to champion a spiritual revival. While governments and billionaires alike continued the race toward more far-reaching and private space travel, Koh and Abramović expressed that one can travel in a more meaningful way, without destroying the planet.

Decelerate at all costs! This was the call made by Oscar Murillo on the cover of the ninth issue of L’OFFICIEL Art. It could seem almost prophetic, knowing that the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and beyond would soon compel us all to rethink our relationship to time. (The fast-paced life of the pre-COVID era now seems obsolete. The question is for how long.) This cover, inspired by his collaboration with the Colombian musician collective, We Don’t Work Sundays, also speaks to Murillo’s practice more generally. His paintings and installations, composed of different types of fabrics and organic material, are physical palimpsests of different gestures and cultural references. For this issue, the logo of the magazine itself was redesigned by the artist, using the African-American flag created by David Hammons in 1990 as inspiration.

For the 14th issue of the magazine, Swiss artist Pamela Rosenkranz recreated the pink, slimy monster from the cult horror movie, The Blob, for the issue’s cover. The work was based on a project the artist created for the 2015 Swiss Pavilion, exploring how micro-organisms inhabit our bodies and shape our relationship to the outside world. Composed solely of a pink swimming pool, her pavilion called into question the material construction of the standardised northern European skin tone through migration, sun exposure, nutrition, and other factors. Rosenkranz has been at the forefront of a group of artists and thinkers who espouse the philosophy known as speculative realism, which rethinks what it means to be a human being by following the assumption that the world is independent of our understanding of it.

Don’t be fooled by the submissive posture of artist Amalia Ulman on the cover of the 20th issue of L’OFFICIEL Art. Ulman’s work explores the ideas of American feminist writer Camille Paglia, and the social regulation and commodification of women’s bodies in the era of social media. The artist has become famous for her Instagram performance “Excellences and Perfections” (2014), in which she played three different female archetypes: the candid Lolita, the venial bimbo, and a Gwyneth Paltrow-esque wellness guru. Blurring the boundary between reality and social spectacle, she received a torrent of comments with shifting degrees of implied violence, depending on whether she had a baby in her arms or faked a boob job. When Ulman revealed that all had been an act, friends and collaborators alike had to question their own reactions and judgments to her various incarnations.

DJ Juliana Huxtable, a fixture of NYC nightlife, started her career when gay parties began to spread around a city that many thought had been lost to gentrification. In the wake of parties such as HAM or Ghetto Gothic, which operated at the intersection of rap, performance, and fashion, Huxtable sculpted her own persona as an ultra-sexy cyber-glamazon inspired by sensual video game avatars. Around 2014, she created Shock Value, a series of parties that became the nexus of the New York artistic avant-garde. She would go on to collaborate with emerging fashion brands like Eckhaus Latta and Telfar, as well as to create critically acclaimed art and poetry on Instagram. In her work, Huxtable deals with the racialization of bodies, social stereotypes, and internet subcultures, as well as American paranoia and conspiracies.

Who is the man smiling with one tooth missing? It’s a self-portrait of the American artist Kerry James Marshall, which he created at 25 years old. Yet, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self” (1980) might be one of the most important paintings in recent American art history. Neither totally abstract nor completely figurative, it is a portrait of a man rendered invisible by the dominant historical and aesthetical institutional narrative. The work was inspired by Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel,

Invisible Man, which depicts the life of an African-American protagonist rendered socially invisible “simply because people refuse to see him.” Throughout his career, Marshall challenged the traditional “white” painting canon by re-appropriating all its genres, from the pastoral landscape to the family portrait.

In his 1962 post-apocalyptic novel, The Drowned World, author JG Ballard envisioned a future in which global warming has rendered the majority of Earth uninhabitable. Sound familiar? Borrowing the title from the cult English sci-fi writer, the artist, Michael Wang, created a series of photographs, static and almost contemplative, that engage the destructive history of our carbon-obsessed world, from the ancient forests that over millenia slowly transformed into coal and later fueled the Industrial Revolution. By confronting the viewer with the cycle of carbon-energy production, from the lush forest to the coal complex, Wang wants to force an alternative image of modernity in our collective imagination. At a time in which our future has never appeared so frightening, Wang’s photographic series might be a starting point from which to radically rethink what we view as progress.

Ending our lives for the sake of the planet? This invitation is yet another transgressive, agitprop action by electronic composer, artist, and eco-activist Chris Korda, who was featured in the summer 2020 issue of L’OFFICIEL Art. This issue in many ways attempted to take the pulse of the art world (and the world at large) by featuring a selection of the most radical and innovative exhibitions of the past year. Little did we know, the pandemic was slowly taking its grip around the globe, and would give this issue and Chris Korda’s Dada 1993 slogan — ”Save The Planet, Kill Yourself” — a whole new relevance. On the occasion of her retrospective at Goswell Road in Paris in 2019, L’OFFICIEL Art featured documents from The Church of Euthanasia (1992-2019), a surrealist collective aiming at "restoring balance between Humans and the remaining species on Earth." Yet, behind the political prank laid one essential message that is more relevant than ever: Earth is a finite thing that cannot be exploited for the sake of only one species.

Conceived during the worldwide pandemic, this most recent issue revisited something of utmost importance: family. Family by blood or family by heart, the most perennial form of social organization, also proved to be one of the most essential at a time in which each of us were separated from our loved ones. This issue aimed to give new notions to the very traditional idea of family — and parenthood — by featuring alternative visions of its ideals. American photographer Talia Chetrit’s body of work features her family prominently, both her parents and herself, as well as her husband and their child. If some of the images are imbued with a certain classicism, others subvert the family portrait genre with a sense of camp, kink, glamour, and grotesque beauty. Her work, and this issue of L’OFFICIEL Art in general, explored the many definitions of family and family portraiture. Far from the traditional vision of the family as something given and static, the artists featured here celebrated the family as a reflection of many types of love.

L'OFFICIEL Art USA Winter 2021 will hit newsstands on November 23, 2021 and is available to order online here.