M/M Paris – Carpetalogue

Last Thursday was the beginning of a busy weekend for art lovers in London as the art-world descended on the city for the Frieze art fair. Whilst the fair got under way in Regents park, galleries all over London opened new shows. Top of my list was the M/M Paris exhibition at Gallery Libby Sellers. It had been six years since M/M Paris last exhibited in London, so this was a long overdue opportunity to see their work up close and in the flesh. For this exhibition, Carpetalogue, M/M Paris recreated four of their works as enormous hand made carpets. The carpets took their designs from a variety of sources in the M/M Paris archive including their icon The Agent, pages from a sketch book and a Givenchy invite. The carpets were presented like pages of a book on multicoloured wooden frames (the weight of the carpets was so great that the frames needed some unexpected reinforcement to cope with them).

In addition to the carpets, M/M Paris were also launching their new retrospective monograph The M to M of M/M Paris. Both Mathias and Michaël were on hand to sign copies of this and a selection of their other books, including two new limited edition books, Slatur and The Givenchy Files (which I will post about later). For those of you in London you can visit a pop-up shop in the gallery where you can buy a wide range of new and hard to find books and objects from M/M Paris, for those of you around the world you can buy direct from M/M Paris here.

The back of the carpet and the frame

Pop-up shop to fulfil all your M/M Paris desires

Visionaire 60: Religion – In Collaboration with Riccardo Tisci

Whenever Visionaire team up with a fashion house you know its going to be a good issue. For No. 60, Visionaire teamed up with Riccardo Tisci, creative director for Givenchy, to explore the theme of religion. The credits for the images read like a who’s who of the fashion and art worlds and includes such luminaries as Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, Marina Abramovic, Carine Roitfeld, Douglas Gordon, Pedro Almodovar and Gareth Pugh to name but a few. The images, all black and white, are interspersed with eight gold pages which represent  his sisters and mother and a single black page which represents his father who died when Tisci was four. The book is bound in leather, with the title embossed on the front, and is housed in a plexiglass lined wooden box carved out of antique doors that mimic an altar piece. In a nice touch, it is also infused with a fragrance by Yann Vasnier which evokes the smell of an incense filled church. The edition is limited to 3000 copies and is sure to become highly collectible in the years to come.

John Stezaker

Roger Ballen

Me Company

Christian Holstad and Gold Insert

Jonathan Schipper and Amelia Biewald

Olivier Theyskens