Tuesday, May 18, 2010

pavane for a dead princess

internationally renowned fashion icon rick owens has been dabbling in furniture design for his own parisian apartment for years. lately, though, owens has been bringing his ethereal and visceral vision of interior decorative design to a wider market. his latest effort is an installation at salon 94 gallery uptown in manhattan; the space is transformed into a conceptualized bedroom which calls to mind a postmodern elsie de wolfe, or perhaps the re-imagined alabaster chambers of antony and cleopatra. from the salon 94 exhibition description:

"Owens’ singular vision as a designer fuses archaism with modernism, brutal beauty with uncompromising luxury. As in his pioneering fashion design, Owens juxtaposes the most basic materials with the most extravagant: leather and cotton in a biker jacket, for example, or alabaster and plywood in his new bedroom, Pavane for a Dead Princess. Owens’ previous furniture has incorporated resin, horn, marble, bronze, leather, concrete, plywood, and cowhide. His scale shifts from broad and muscular works to lean and curved ones. Some surfaces are left untreated—rough to the touch—while others are polished or covered in fur."

informed in part by ravel's 1899 composition of the same title, pavane for a dead princess is a fabulous example of the contemporary desire for a unified design aesthetic in diverse media and fields.

a few installation views:

4 comments:

Yukon said...

I less than three that bed. That looks awesome.

Madame Lamb said...

less than three- i like that, mad hatter.

here's ravel- paval http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKkeDqJBlK8 (a processional for a dead princess)

i want my apartment to look like a dead princess's bed chamber.

stolibolly said...

thanks for the link ML.

Abigail Wise said...

Wow. Really interesting work!

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