A Patrick Nagel spread from an Eighties Playboy, selected by the designer Jeremy Scott on view at Partners & Spade. Curated by personalities such as Simon Doonan and Andre Balazs, the retrospective features large-scale prints of Playboy centerfolds and magazine artworks commissioned by Playboy including Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Frank Gallo, and Helmut Newton. The exhibition coincides with the launch of the the new PlayboyiPad application, showcasing the entirely digitalised archive of issues from the past 57 years since its first issue in December 1953 with Marilyn Monroe on its cover. Photo Bill Powers
For her first solo show in France, American artist Elizabeth Peyton has created a series of small-scale tightly framed works acting as visual biography. Staying faithful to the sensuality of her intimiste genre, Peyton chronicles moments of life through her friends, artistic entourage and inspirational figures such as Berliner Klara Liden, Nate Lowman, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Pencil and oil portraits of our culture's Zeitgeist - Patti Smith, Kanye West and Justin Bieber are displayed alongside Isa Genzken with still lives based around the late French sculptor Camille Claudel. Alongside her own still life studies in Berlin and Paris, Peyton's placement of her subject evolves into the fetishisation of objects and elements as emotional connection to the person such as Camille Claudel Still Life (2010/2011), with sculpture and roses. Often using photographs as source material, the repetitive anonymity of mass-media fall short from Peyton's emotional world. Not one for the Warholian detachment, Peyton has described the act of painting a portrait as a meditative encounter. From her unique watercolour Klara (2010) to the pensive Nate (Nate Lowman 2011), an instinctual curation and insight casts her subjects into emotional pigments. Her portraits invite to the idolising contemplation of their physical aura - but beyond their distinct mystique, it's that transitory moment we continue to feel in Peyton's instinct, when the humane transcends the persona. Photo and text Sophie Pinchetti
New Works by Elizabeth Peyton, on view until July 28 at the Gagosian Gallery, 4 rue de Ponthieu, Paris.
Chelsea's Tanya Bonakdar Gallery presents
British artist Gillian Wearing's first New York solo exhibition in over
eight years. Set over two floors, the show presents photographs,
sculpture and two videos by the artist. In a small confessional,
Wearing projects Secrets and Lies. Participants wear flesh colored
rubber mask concealing their identities apart from their eyes. They
were instructed by the artist to confess their darkest secrets on
camera. Among the revelations: a middle aged virgin and a man who wants
to cut off his penis. Alongside this video, Wearing presents a small
group of medium format photographs. Each is a self portrait of the
artist interpreting a major figure from recent art history including
Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe. Gillian Wearing is on view until 24
June at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, New York.
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