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Issue # 22
Archive stories
Autumn/Winter 2018-19
Featuring: Fernando Botero, Françoise Mouly, Nazario Luque, Oh Hyuk, Gertrude Abercrombie, Mélanie Scarciglia & Christophe Boutin, BV Doshi, Yvon Lambert, Sheila Heti, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Nick Murphy, Ruben Östlund, Ingo Maurer, Campbell Addy, and Ruth Rogers. Plus: ‘Helena: A Shadow in the Plaza Real’, a comic by Nazario Luque, and The Crystal and the Flame, the Sardinia of Alberto Ponis.
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Text by Leah Singer
Sheila Heti
Watercolours by Leanne Shapton Toronto: The epigraph in Sheila Heti’s latest novel, Motherhood, is a quote from a musician in Washington Square Park: ‘There’s a hole in my life, there’s a life in my hole’. Like the musician, Heti finds the upside to the downside in life’s disappointments and curve balls and she does so…
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Text by Hugo Macdonald
Ruth Rogers
In her West London home, on one of the stickiest days of a roasting hot summer, Ruth Rogers is as cool as a cucumber. Ruthie, as she’s known, is in full swing describing with a clipped-yet-husky American precision the sequence of tasks that take place before service begins at the River Cafe. Her living room…
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Text by Madeleine Willis
Yvon Lambert
Paris: When I first moved to Paris, I went through a process common to most foreigners arriving in a new city—haphazardly but carefully tracking down a few locales that will soon become your regulars and keep you feeling grounded while you otherwise fumble through the adjustment. Yvon’s bookshop was one of those places for me;…
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Text by Maisie Skidmore
Campbell Addy
London: He’s only two years out of art school, but 25-year-old British–Ghanaian photographer Campbell Addy is already well known for making searing portraits that resonate in the mind’s eye long after you’ve looked away from them. Powerful and poised, his photographs probe into established ideas around beauty, identity, and masculinity, writing a new narrative which…
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Text by Michael Bullock
Jonathan Lyndon Chase
Philadelphia: Jonathan Lyndon Chase is at the tail end of a breakthrough year. In 2018, from his home/studio in the Olney section of Philadelphia, the former Baptist-church usher has produced two back-to-back, critically acclaimed, sold-out solo shows: ‘A Quiet Storm’, at New York City’s Company Gallery in March, followed up quickly in June with ‘Sheets’,…
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Text by Jocelyn Silver
Nick Murphy
New York City: Australian musician Nick Murphy, or the artist formerly known as Chet Faker, lives in New York City’s Soho, but south—a block inching close enough to Chinatown that stoops have graffiti and there are no visible doormen. But it is, of course, luxe: the last time I was in a private apartment on…
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Text by Gabriel Fowler
Françoise Mouly
New York City: Françoise Mouly has lived life on her own terms and arrived at her prominent position as art editor of the New Yorker through a lifetime of experiments in publishing and design. She entered the boys club of American underground comics in the ‘70s and proceeded to reshape it in new and exciting…
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Text by Ji-Un Nah
Oh Hyuk
Seoul: At 25, Oh Hyuk is the leader, vocalist, and guitar player for the band Hyukoh. The group’s name is an inversion of his own. Oh suddenly found himself a symbol of South Korean youth culture with his album 20, which he released as a 21-year-old uni student working part-time at Vans. For young South Koreans…
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Text by August Becker
Gertrude Abercrombie
On meeting Gertrude I first encountered Gertrude—perhaps ‘observed’ would be a better term—at the South Side Art Fair. I had moved to the south side in 1952 at the end of my second year at the Art Institute of Chicago. I was 19 years old. At the art fair she did not just take a…
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Text by Arquitectura-G
The Crystal and the Flame
Palau: On a flight from Barcelona to Olbia early in the morning, we catch the sunrise over the northern part of Sardinia, the island’s astonishingly vivid peachy-pink granite reflecting the sun’s early-morning rays. Touching down, we then drive to Palau, where the Italian architect Alberto Ponis and his wife, AnnaRita Zalaffi, receive us at their home….
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Text by Komal Sharma
BV Doshi
Ahmedabad: On a day in March this year, a jury member of the Pritzker Architecture Prize made a telephone call to the home of BV Doshi, in Ahmedabad, India. She asked, first, if he still travels—he is 90—and then went on to invite him to the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, for he had been awarded…
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Text by Robbie Whitehead
Ruben Östlund
Gothenburg: I’m on a train on my way to see Swedish film director Ruben Östlund. It’s my first time in Sweden and the general state of midsummer-induced euphoria among the people I’ve been meeting has seduced me. It’s sunny, green, and the days actually don’t end. Ruben, who is originally from Styrsö, a small island off…
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Text by Haydée Touitou
Mélanie Scarciglia & Christophe Boutin
Paris: Both Tim and I were excited to go to the 13th arrondissement, an area of Paris too often considered a no man’s land, except for the streets and boulevards that make up Chinatown.Tim has actually spent a few years in the neighbourhood, and most of my family members have lived there at one point or…
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Text by Kim Hastreiter
Ingo Maurer
New York City: ‘Helloooooo. My name is INGO, and I MAKE LIGHT!’ Forty years ago, this is the first thing my new handsome upstairs neighbour announced to me in his booming voice as he barged into my Tribeca loft and began whirling in circles like a dervish one stoned Saturday afternoon. Then, ‘I just moved upstairs….
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Text by Pere Pedrals
Nazario Luque
Barcelona: At number 12 Plaza Real, to the right of the doorway, half-hidden, some little angels with sex-doll mouths remind the visitor that Ocaña lived in this house; Ocaña, the artist who scandalised the Ramblas with his costumes and stripteases while Spain was still under a dictatorship. We press the door phone for Nazario’s flat; he…
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Text by Jessica Piersanti
Fernando Botero
Pietrasanta: Where and when to meet Fernando Botero? It’s not an easy task to meet the 86-year-old Colombian artist. Known worldwide for his volumetric stylisation of figures and objects, Fernando Botero still navigates between five countries throughout the year. You can find him in Monaco in winter, in New York in October, in Italy and Greece…