JUNE PLAYLIST
SP LIST: ART EXHIBITIONS & BOOKS
The Art of Dressing. Dressing like an Artist, at Musée du Louvre-Lens
until 21 July 2025
Fashion and art have always collided in the most evocative way, and that interplay of creative expression speaks to all of us. Which is why an exhibition in Paris has set out to explore how these two dynamic worlds intersect and inspire each other and, at times, become one.
“The Art of Dressing: Dressing Like an Artist,” reveals what the sartorial choices of artists said about their place in society – who they desired to be portrayed as, vs. what they actually wore, and how in some cases, they fought social norms, allowing a sense of freedom in the way we dress today.
We also see gender identity and cross-dressing’s impact on style, with icons such as Warhol’s series of Polaroid self-portraits, where he used dresses and wigs to transform from man to woman, and works showing the pioneering 19th-century French female writer George Sand, who preferred to wear men’s clothing.
The exhibition features over 200 hundred works of art, alongside sculptures, clothing, haute-couture creations, drawings, photographs and videos, from the Renaissance through to the present day. As a visual reflection of the daily conversation we have with personal style, the curation also includes a wall of mirrors, inspired by the late designer Alexander McQueen’s SS01 "VOSS" show, where visitors can see themselves and question what their outfit says about them.
Aries Arise Archive, 2025, Rizzoli Books
Designed by former i-D Creative Director, Jonny Lu and published by Rizzoli New York, iconic label Aries has launched the “Aries Arise Archive”, the streetwear brand's new book which traces a decade of cultural impact.
Featuring Alasdair McClellan, David Sims, Juergen Teller, Lea Colombo and more, the photo tome celebrates over fifteen years of boundary-pushing creativity, since its launch in 2009 by Sofia Prantera and Fergus Purcell.
With a foreword written by fashion journalist Angelo Flaccavento, the 300-page book features a man dressed as a ram on the cover, part of the David Sims series ‘Click to Buy’. It compiles photographs of their collaborations and community, graphics and their cult classic clothing, all acting as a retrospective of their multitude of projects which continually changed and elevated customs of youth culture.
The Chair by the Window Is an Old Friend, at Anonymous Gallery in New York
until 14 June 2025
This group show which includes the work of artists including Nan Goldin, Mike Kelley and Félix González-Torres, explores the complex relationship between our personal spaces, our homes and the objects we live and interact with – reflecting our identities, memories, and aspirations, existing as self-portraits layered with our past and future.
The home is often seen as a place of tranquillity and comfort, but can also be a source of tension, turmoil and confinement, a safe place but also isolating. Each of the works in the show unfolds a journey through these contradictions, such as Gonzalez-Torres’s mirrored “Untitled” (Fear), 1991 – which offers a play on how mirrors in our homes reflect us and the changing space we’re in, we identify who we are through them, and at times, that might not feel good or a comfortable place to be.
Vaginal Davis, Fabelhaftes Produkt at Gropius Bau, Berlin
until 14 September 2025
Marking twenty years since drag artist, writer and performer Vaginal Davis made Berlin her home, Gropius Bau presents the first expansive solo exhibition in Germany of her queer outsider art. Having first exploded onto the punk performance scene in LA in the late 1970s’, her maxi-gendered and multiracial fictional characters and unapologetically art-punk bands, transgressed society’s norms with an electrifying celebration of subversive glamour, desire and radical creativity.
The exhibition follows this expansive oeuvre from 1985 to 2025, featuring large-scale installations, paintings, video and film works, zines, writing, music and performances, offering an overview of Davis’ practice and artistic collaborations, including the Berlin-based art collective CHEAP and New York-based artist Jonathan Berger, among many others.
Mark Leckey: As Above So Below, at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris
until 20 July 2025
Working across film, video, sculpture, and performance, British artist Mark Leckey’s hypnotic work explores the relationship between memory, popular culture, technology, and the impact of cultural objects on our identities, through the looking glass of youth, class and nostalgia – particularly the intersection of music subcultures from rave to punk.
His latest exhibition, “As Above So Below”, brings together around 20 artworks spanning his career, from the late 1990s to the present day, including his breakthrough cult-classic British youth film “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore” (1999), an immersive mash-up of the UK’s underground club scene. The beating heart of the show centres around the ecstatic—a transportive state beyond the individual self, where we’re immersed in moments of overwhelming emotion, from the artist’s sense of disorienting experiences.
Paul McCartney Rearview Mirror: Photographs, December 1963-February 1964 at Gagosian Beverly Hills
until 21 June 2025
Taken during the rise of Beatlemania, an immersive exhibition at Gagosian Beverly Hills, showcases thirty-six works of rediscovered photographs shot with a 35 mm Pentax camera by Sir Paul McCartney. The never-before-seen black-and-white images, captured between December 1963 and February 1964, include self-portraits and candid shots of McCartney’s bandmates. We also experience an insider’s take on the fan pandemonium that followed them, such as images taken from inside a moving car, as the band travelled between gigs from Liverpool to London and Paris or New York.
Daniel Weiss: Pay Phone, Smog Press
Like a love letter to the New York of old, photographer Daniel Weiss’ new monograph documents the last of the city’s public pay phones, which disappeared forever in 2022.
For more than a decade, Weiss has been capturing the streets of Manhattan, having lived in the same apartment he grew up in during the 1990s and 00s, visually chronicling the rarities and oddities of the changing and fading landscape around him.
A nostalgic ode to an era long gone, surpassed by technology and the private isolation of mobile phones – Weiss’ phone booths act as a backdrop for portraits of the pulsing city’s sidewalk characters.
Text by Kate Lawson