Rick Owens

Jun 1, 2024 | artforum.com | Percy Zvomuya |Barry Schwabsky |Vaginal Davis |Rick Owens

Sylvester Mubayi’s The Great Spirit, 1973OUTSIDE THE ENTRANCE to the National Gallery of Zimbabwe—a squat, airy, sun-sponging edifice in Harare designed by Montgomerie and Oldfield, students of Le Corbusier—stands a stone sculpture by Sylvester Mubayi. Over six feet tall, the dome-headed, four-eyed, slit-mouthed Great Spirit, 1973, watches over the sinuous Julius Nyerere Way. The stone bouncer observes passersby on the busy throughfare, but the pedestrians also look back.

May 1, 2024 | artforum.com | Vaginal Davis |Rick Owens |Lola Kramer |Molly Warnock

RICK OWENS: Do you remember the first time we met? VAGINAL DAVIS: Oh, yes, I do. You were doing work with this band called, I think, Red Wedding? Do you remember them? RO: I do. VD: I forgot exactly if you were making costumes for them or designing something for their stage shows. RO: I wasn’t. I was fucking the singer. VD: Ha! That’s how we first met, through Red Wedding. I think it was at one of their shows, and I was wearing an outfit where I was sort of copying one of my mother’s looks.

May 1, 2024 | artforum.com | Pablo Larios |Barry Schwabsky |Vaginal Davis |Rick Owens

“I EXPEL MYSELF, I spit myself out, I abject myself,” writes Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror, her 1980 classic of psychoanalytic criticism. In Mire Lee’s morbid environments, fluids surge, orifices open, and pipes leak, though we are never sure what, or who, comes out of them. “I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit,” Kristeva continues. This image—of birth through convulsion—captures the pathos of Lee’s regurgitative sculptures.

May 1, 2024 | artforum.com | Zsofi Valyi-Nagy |Barry Schwabsky |Vaginal Davis |Rick Owens

THIS PAST DECEMBER, pioneering computer artist Vera Molnar died at the age of ninety-nine. To celebrate her achievements—and to mark the opening of a major exhibition of her work at Centre Pompidou, Paris, now on view through August 26—Artforum invited artist and art historian Zsofi Valyi-Nagy to provide an overview of Molnar’s oeuvre.

May 1, 2024 | artforum.com | Ara Osterweil |Barry Schwabsky |Vaginal Davis |Rick Owens

The female predators of recent cinemaFROM D. W. GRIFFITH’S incendiary Birth of a Nation (1915) and Broken Blossoms (1919) to Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation of Lolita (1955) to Brooke Shields’s performance as a preteen prostitute in Pretty Baby (1978) to the infatuation with a teenager that sets off Kevin Spacey’s midlife crisis in American Beauty (1999), American cinema’s audiences have been riveted by depictions of intergenerational relationships and intimations of predatory abuse.