"Christian Dior and Chinese Artists" Exhibition"Christian Dior and Chinese Artists" Exhibition | ArtZineChina.com | 中国艺志
By ArtZineChina
he Ullens Center for Contemporary Art presents the exhibition "Christian Dior and Chinese Artists" starting November 16th, 2008 in Beijing.
Twenty-two Chinese commissioned artists were presented at the event, included: Wang Du, Zhang Huan, Huang Rui, Li Songsong, Zhang Dali, Xu Zhongmin, Liu Jianhua, Lu Hao, Wang Qingsong, Yan Lei, Zhang Xiaogang,Wen Fang, Shi Jingsong, Wang Gongxin, Shi Xiaofan, Liu Wei, Rong Rong & Inri, Tim Yip, Qiu Zhijie and Ma Yangsong.Over one hundred Dior Couture pieces were sent directly from Paris to exhibit at the UCCA, among which includes the “New Look” which is one of the most influential Couture pieces in the history of fashion, designed by Mr. Christian Dior (1095 – 1957) in 1947. After years of variations, the exhibition combines contemporary Chinese art pieces inspired by Dior’s most prominent codes, such as Tailleur bar, Façade avenue Montaigne, Dior perfume, Lady Dior, and portrait of Mr. Christian Dior etc., with Couture pieces designed by Dior Couture ingenious Artistic Director, Mr. John Galliano.
The originality of this project relies on an unusual layout that brings the visitor to the heart of the Chinese art scene. The works reveal a unique process of confronting Eastern and Western cultures in a futuristic perspective.
The exhibition will be held at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Arts until January 15th, 2009. Images of the art works from the exhibition are as follow:
Huang Rui, Timeless white cloud, Installation, black and white artificial pearls, iron threads, 13m x 3m x1.8m
Li Song, Light bag, Installation, neons, 3m x 6.6m x 6.4m
Liu Wei, Fragments, Installation, steel, Iron, painting, 10mx10mx260cm
Lu Hao, Illusion 1947, Installation, fiberglass, wood, artificial flowers, 400x500x70cm
Ma Yansong, the DIOR boutique
Qiu Zhijie, Three pools mirroring the moon, Installation. steel, stones
Rong rong and Inri, Untitled 1-5, Photography, Hand colored silver gelatin print, 130x150cm x 5
Shi Jinsong, Design. gene, Installation, inox, couteaux, flechettes, 2m - 4-5 diameters
Shi Quentin, The stranger in the glass box, Photography, media injek print on archive paper, 190cm x 112cm
Tim Yip, Floating Leaf Garden
Wang Du,Image Making, Carpet, New-Zealand wool 800x600 cm
Wang Gongxing, Synchronization, Video installation, 13x11m
Wang Qingsong, Nutrition, 照片，Photographie, C-print, 2008,160x300cm
Wen Fang, Hole In The Wall，Hope In The World, Installation, bricks, 800x240x30 cm
Xu Zhongmin, U-walk, Installation, inox, plexiglas, fibre de verre, lumières, moteur, 1200cm x 100cm x 300cm
Yan Lei, Sparkling-Marylin en Dior, Oil on canvas, 180cm x 250cm
Zhang Dali, AK47(L1), Painting, acrylic on vinyl, 225x300cm
Zhang Huan, North Star n.2, Painting, ash on linen, 168cm x 336cm x 17cm
Zhang Huan, North Star n.3, Installation, silkscreen mounted on carved antique wood door, 300cm x 238cm
Zhang Huan, Giant n.3, 2008, Mixed installation, cow skin, steel, wood and polystyrene foam, 1000 x 460 x 420cm
Zhang Xiaogang, Worker Peasant Businessman Student Soldier, Sculptures, Bronze
Zheng Guogu, Oxyder pendant 2000 ans -Dior，Installation, acier, 1m x 30cm x 1m
Celebrities and Artists, from left to right: Wen Fang, Li Songsong, Yan Lei, Shi Xiaofan, Ma Yansong, Huang Rui, Zhang Dali, Shi Jinsong, Zhang Xiaogang, Wang Qing Song, Liu Jianhua, Wang Gongxin, Ye Jintian, Xu Zhongmin, Qiu Zhijie, Inri, Rong Rong
July 18, 2009
"Christian Dior and Chinese Artists" Exhibition | ArtZineChina.com | 中国艺志
Li Song - Light bag Installation - Christine Dior Events | ArtZineChina.com | 中国艺志
Li Song - Light bag Installation - Christine Dior Events | ArtZineChina.com | 中国艺志Pictures from Christine Dior Events | ArtZineChina.com | 中国艺志
By ArtZineChina
he Ullens Center for Contemporary Art presents the exhibition "Christian Dior and Chinese Artists" starting November 16th, 2008 in Beijing.
380 honorable guests and top notch society luminaries attended the gala evening which marked the opening of the exhibition starting
November 15th, 2008 in Beijing. Lead by Mr. Bernard Arnault, (Chairman and CEO of LVMH and Christian Dior), Guy and Myram Ullens, Mr. Sidney Toledano, (President and CEO Christian Dior Couture), Mr. Claude Martinez, (President and CEO Christian Dior Parfumes) and Mr. John Galliano (Artistic Director of Dior Couture), the exhibition opening was celebrated and witnessed with some of the most important guests and celebrities from across 18 countries.
Top celebrities from across the world also came to celebrate this special occasion for Dior and the Ullens Center. They were Charlize Theron (spokesperson of Christian Dior “J'adore” Fragrance), Marion Cotillard (the new face of Lady Dior bag), Eva Green (spokesperson of the Christian Dior “Midnight Poison” Frangrance), Maggie Cheung (Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival), Michelle Yeoh (Best Actress at the BAFTA awards), Ms. Mylène Jampanoï (spokesperson of Diorsnow). Other Asian top celebrities includes, Zhao Wei, Chen Kun, Li Bing Bing, Lin Chiling, Tang Wei, Chang Chen, Hidetoshi Nakata, Han Chae Young, Shawn Yu, Vivian Wu, Tan Yuan Yuan, Zhang Jing Chu, Gao Yuan Yuan, Yundi Li, Lv Yan, Du Juan.
The world of Christian Dior Couture and Chinese Contemporary Art stepped hands in hands at this night of celebration, fashion and Chinese Contemporary Art to mark the beginning of The “Christian Dior and Chinese Artists” exhibition. The exhibition will be held at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Arts until January 15th, 2009.
Here are some pictures from the opening:
Left to right: Mr. Bernard Arnault, Charlie Theron, John Galliano, Mr. Sidney Toledano
Left to right: Maggie Chen, Charlie Theron, John Galliano, Mr. Bernard Arnault
LVMH Group
Li Bing Bing
Left to right: Lin Chi Ling, Hidetoshi Nakata
Fei Pei (Center)
Left to right: , Mylène Jampoi, Marion Cotillard
Ye Jintian and Liu Jianhua
Left to right: He Hong Jie and Chen Anni
Left to right: Tang Wei, Chang Chen
Left to right: Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Chen
Zhang Jing Chu
Left to right: Chang Chen, Michelle Yeoh
Zhao Wei
Left to right: Zhang Huan, Lin Chi Lin
Left to right: Du Juan, Fei Pei
Christian Dior
Christian Dior
Christian Dior
Christian Dior
Shi Jinsong, Design. gene, Installation, inox, couteaux, flechettes, 2m - 4-5 diameters
Yan Lei, Sparkling-Marylin en Dior, Oil on canvas, 180cm x 250cm
Zhang Xiaogang, Worker Peasant Businessman Student Soldier, Sculptures, Bronze
Wen Fang, Hole In The Wall，Hope In The World, Installation, bricks, 800x240x30 cm
Christian Dior
Display in the exhibition
Christian Dior and Zhang Dali, AK47(L1), Painting, acrylic on vinyl, 225x300cm
Display in the exhibition
Li Song, Light bag, Installation, neons, 3m x 6.6m x 6.4m
Wang Gongxing, Synchronization, Video installation, 13x11m
Jane Aldridge - Sea of Shoes
Jane Aldridge - Sea of Shoes
Video sent by mrjynJane Aldridge is calm, composed and homeless. Includes 'Teen Vogue' and 'French Glamour,' and hundreds of blogs, whose readers track her every footstep--Jane is unfazed, but not immune to scrutiny. This featureless includes shiny 'boot-y' from her closet [recognizable to readers of 'Sea of Shoes'--her industry-watched blog, described here as, 'One of the most popular blogs on the Internet']. Most hits in a day? [61,000]. Kenya West 'boot-y call'? [Yes, but not what you're thinking. rapper, turned fashionable Sofa was all 'businessperson.] Gumshoes? A confirmation! Exotica-gardenias compressible freethinkers sideshow Paris [Frankincense], Jane's shoes artfully parked in their own showroom, her bedroom closet. [I have witnessed grown women, teenage girls, and not a few men comment SOS, combining bliss, agony, deep-green envy, and obeisant supplication, with the rare Jerry Springer-reject thrown in for kicks.]
Jane, with insight beyond her years, and an easy Texas laugh appropriate to them [due in part to her mother, Judy--former model, current retailer: 'Atlantis Vintagecredits Mom for inspiration and early initiation by Kabuki.This three-minute clip [accompanied by awful techno], conceived as an human interest peek into Jane's closet,finds Jane flipping absurdity into Zen pancakes Cocksure, not cocky, Jane [with a twinkle] begins, 'If I were a shoe...,' selecting a chic '09 Alaïa 'Maryjane on Steroids' and anthropomorphizing it with only a modicum of detectable bullshit into that which would normally define superfluity, but which here transforms a teenage puff-piece, tabled in Dallas, into a real fashion remote from Trophy Club, where suburban student Jane turns into 'Shoeshine' Superhero--"Shoestring J"!
~Myrwyn
Dash Snow artist. (Poebituarium)
artist.Dash Snow rammed a screwdriver into his buzzer other day.
He has no phone.
He Downs now if you want to speak to him you have to go by his apartment on Bowery and yell up Borax like.
He welcome to window to let you see that.
He sees you.
He has a periscope.
He puts up.
He can check you out first • Seemed Happy and Healthy Say Shocked Friends • Will Work Benefit From Ghoul Factor Partly it comes from his graffiti days this elusiveness recent adolescence year old spent tagging city and dodging police Pretty paranoid about lots of things in general and some of it was dished out to him but others Created himself friendless year old artist who like many of their friends has made significant artistic contributions to ever expanding mythology of .
Dash Snow and went to London together this fall for show in which they both had work had bought one sculpture for $ got them a fancy hotel room on Piccadilly They had to flee it in middle of night with their suitcases before it was discovered that threatened one of their Hamster Nests which they ' re quite a few times before To make a Hamster Nest and shred up to phone books yank around all blankets and drapes turn on taps take off their clothes and do drugs mushrooms coke ecstasy until they feel like hamsters * Warhol Children and Best of Bowery School * * * A Note From If you want to find you have to find brother best friend year old photographer who four years ago became youngest person ever to have a solo show That show Kids Are Alright depicted a downtown nevermore where people are thrilled and naked leaping in front of graffiti on street sacked out in heaps of flannel shirts everything very debauched and drug addled and decadent like hit with a happy wand Part of what made famous like before him was that.
He offered not just an artistry of a free and rebellious alternative life but also promise that.
He was actually living it through photos that looked spontaneous stolen of an intimate cast of characters a family of friends and incise of in particular In some ways has been his muse I guess I get obsessed with people and I really became fascinated by .
Dash Snow says who shares a Chinatown loft a few blocks away compartmental with whom has known since they were teenage skateboarders in apartment used to be a brothel for a long time Chinese men would come to door and be disappointed when or answered it shows me his photos of over years dozens and dozens of them with cornrows with a shaved head with a black eye There is one photo called .
Dash Snow Bombing that was in show a shadowy shot of out on a ledge tagging a building in night sky Manhattan spread out below him Tan image of anarchic freedom one that seems anachronistic and almost magical in this city of hermetically sealed glass cocoon condo towers Its if were an animal prevalent in seventies now thought to be extinct that was spotted high over city I actually manlike graffiti says I was just interested in person that would write their name thousands and thousands and thousands of times These kids that would go up on a rooftop stories up and go out on a ledge to write their name justify like insanity of it all !
Drugs Heroin Overdose .
Dash Snow Death Art Greasepaint this acrylic work in but since .
Dash Snowdrop has renamed it For .
Dash Snow after her friend Last time I lived and worked in NYC granted it was a while ago was a third tier gossip columnist whose beat was art openings and parties Underground on Union Square In intervening years.
He has apparently become an ghostwriter here proves.
He is yet another shill who makes RIDICULOUS and insulting if I were Paul McCarthy or late contextual arguments for minute flamethrower career of .
Dash Snow pedigree of family and once power maker but no more Mary Boone and theme parties are Down heroin that.
He simply can not resist argument that and art world of early st century is in any way similar to and art world of early is insane on face of it world of was peculiar to a different City and world in transition Ask Cameron Refill you in What is with all this piling on Tina Brown If you figure you say something enough it will turn out to be true Thailand Administration following three images show .
Dash Snow as shot by his best friend photographer youngest artist to have a solo show Museum of American Art is already considered a canonized photographer age .
Dash Snow was one of his oldest friends and longstanding candidness lyrical images offertory fun are already iconic Of his friend says It hard to remember exactly when I met .
Dash Snow It seems like we were immediately best friends When .
Dash Snow was drunk.
He would always tell you how much.
He loved you You should ' him to stop singing Rolling Stones songs Right before verse Hedgerow you and sing words close to your face One of my favorite things about .
Dash Snow was always his unconscious moving hand.
He would be sitting there smoking cigarettes writing his tag in air without being aware of it I would just smile and watch smoke twirl into letters A Thatch I always remember him A young picture of artist a ARE Weapons show from his friend Rosalie Knox She wrote Look How gorgeous is.
He I have searched through my photo albums to try to find pictures of him I have over giant books Kind of surprised I dividend up with more photos of him.
He was fast ! .
Dash Snow who rebelled against his privileged and legendary art collecting family but became a boa side art star overdosed this week on his meteoric rise and fall Chasing .
Dash Snow.
He is a growing downtown legend a graffiti writer turned artist with a beautiful face and a pedigree elusive even to two friends who created his myth What happens if Caught Add a Comment Comment | ran into one of his mentors Jack Pierson a party in a penthouse staffed by topless men and women.
He got a call from Canadian filmmaker who wanted to meet up a gay club But was leaving for Japan in morning and a certain point Head enough and wanted to get food sat in a red leather booth drinking lemon tea a light on his pale cheeks what do you think went down with .
Dash Snowmobile anyway.
He asks me Whenever told me Who knows maybe someday Hell pull a My Own Private Idaho and go after money I doubt it but you never know .
Dash Snow you know … .
Dash Snow is a man of mystery Last time I lived and worked in NYC granted it was a while ago was a third tier gossip columnist whose beat was art openings and parties Underground on Union Square In intervening years.
He has apparently become an underwriter here proves.
He is yet another shill who makes RIDICULOUS and insulting if I were Paul McCarthy or late contextual arguments for minute flamethrower career of .
Dash Snow pedigree of family and once power maker but no more Mary Boone and theme parties are Sown heroin that.
He simply can not resist argument that and art world of early st century is in any way similar to and art world of early is insane on face of it world of was peculiar to a different City and world in transition Ask Cameron Hellfire you in .
Dash Snow and Martin Image Courtesy of Ana Final Hooligan with Hungry and her boyfriend Scott Martin Of Martin says .
Dash Snow loved listening to records all night.
He would frantically put on a record then gracefully slide up next to you barefoot and I talking about an inch away wrap his arm around your shoulders or waist And Forewarn OK here comes this part these lyrics they ' re damaged watch Then.
He would start reciting words to song in a whisper almost into your mouth sun would be coming up and Hebe lovingly staring into your eyes and singing and after.
He was done reciting his part Flip his cigarette around in his hand and gently put it in your mouth and Purse his lips like.
He was coaching you … and youthful a drag and go Yeah man I fucking love this song too.
He is probably sweetest and kindest person I ever known I love you snowman What is with all this piling on Tina Brown If you figure you say something enough it will turn out to be true Thatcher Administration Charles flew and over to London for his USA Today show Royal Academy.
He put them up a Mayfair hotel where they holed up in their suite and created a specialty a Hamster Nest This was an installation though one less reminiscent of say Ila Nabokov than of Led Zeppelin in Hyatt House ripping a great many telephone directories to bitty bits swirling bedding everywhere and doing enough drugs to hamstring their cranium They decamped from hotel in middle of night apparently just ahead of long arm of law In October and did another Next Yorker Projects on Grand Street Along with volunteers they ripped up telephone books gouged walls and scrawled them with street dumb drawings an ejaculating penis and rude texts It seemed to me a stylish piece of Street Dada showbiz a deliberately unholy reference to another of Di Foundation Sacred Spaces Walter Marine Earth Room which is just around corner on Masterwork was entering what one might call his maturely immature phase lots of semen including a Post covers coated with ejaculate and glitter and his collectors included and Darkish But then.
He just downed and died .
Dash Snowdrop would seem to ensure myth including surely inevitable movie and coverage has trotted out all inevitable ' from Janis Joplin via James Dean to Kurt Cobain But some are angered by what they see as enabling mechanisms of art world support offered by those delighted with energy pumped in by Bad Boys I think some people encouraged this kind of scene says Charles Finch acidulous Art Net columnist With all overdoses and everything that we have had in art world and music world is extremely irresponsible First of all does anyone learn any lessons over years Thereto whole idea of watching a train wreck happen and not pulling a switch to prevent it Millisecond point relates to art made by somebody who might easily be called an accidental artist Was .
Dash Snow a legitimate artist In terms of his practice No .
Dash Snow .
Dash Snow Overdose .
Dash Snow Death .
Dash Snow Art. Not many men has stamina to persist lifestyle of a character in some novel .
Dash Snow is every writers fantasy.
Dash Snow is every writers fantasy even though.
He dies like many stars of last decade.
He is an example of how one can create a persona without sacrificing content and.
He proved that true entities of life is friendship love sex and death Everything else is distractions and in end superfluous supercilious We tend to forget that in a society intoxicated by hypersensitivity and information .
Dash Snow did this without thinking without making a manifest or using reason.
He brought eyes of child into artwork And.
He was no sacrifice all I think people should quit their ontological guilt and deal with their own lives their anxiety and stop bashing .
Dash Snow.
He lives forever kinda Close * wildcat on. Well I guess I hit nail on head witchdoctor .
Dash Snow huh * By Having hung out with many wannabe artists and struggling artistes everyone no more or less than an arrival difficulty to take .
Dash Snow Having hung out with many wannabe artists and struggling artistes everyone no more or less than an archivist difficulty to take Dash Artistically serendipitous endeavors seriously I can not believe they will be as remarkable as called cognoscenti believe they are now in five years Or less I find his work more commemorative than compelling As.
He himself said.
He takes a Polaroid with him during his drunken after hour city trawling.
He can commemorate not his words where ' Shebeen what.
He was doing Perhaps using this perspective results are initially are more like after shocks because of fucked up mess If delusions are raw and primal they can also be called boilerplate in their ability to evoke provoke If art is about viewers gut reaction whether cerebral or primal participation in if not digestion of proprietorial act then .
Dash Snowdrift may be considered beguiling errant machinations In final analysis they possess all cloying self involved psychic disorder kind of energy invested in concocting a feckless hamster nest essentially are visions of a world intimate to a few but closed to others Just as .
Dash Snow and ran off from their pricey London hotel I feel that urge when viewing .
Dash Snowboarding PROV of mundane They fail to grab hold and shake me up night went on and on for hours from one club to next to next one point someone yelled from a crowd in front of Shore Club There goes famous artist.
He gets more famous every day!
Chasing Artist and Downtown Legend Dash Snow -- New York Magazine
Chasing Artist and Downtown Legend Dash Snow -- New York MagazineChasing Dash Snow
At 25, he is a growing downtown legend, a graffiti writer turned artist with a beautiful face and a De Menil pedigree, elusive even to the two friends who created his myth. What happens if he’s caught?
The artist Dash Snow rammed a screwdriver into his buzzer the other day. He has no phone. He doesn’t use e-mail. So now, if you want to speak to him, you have to go by his apartment on Bowery and yell up. Lorax-like, he won’t come to the window to let you see that he sees you: He has a periscope he puts up so he can check you out first.
Partly, it comes from his graffiti days, this elusiveness, the recent adolescence the 25-year-old Snow spent tagging the city and dodging the police. “He’s pretty paranoid about lots of things in general, and some of it was dished out to him, but others he’s created himself,” says Snow’s friend, the 27-year-old artist Dan Colen, who—like so many of their friends—has made significant artistic contributions to the ever-expanding mythology of Dash Snow. Colen and Snow went to London together this fall for the Saatchi show in which they both had work. (Saatchi had bought one of Colen’s sculptures for $500,000.) Saatchi got them a fancy hotel room on Piccadilly. They had to flee it in the middle of the night with their suitcases before it was discovered that they’d created one of their Hamster’s Nests, which they’ve done quite a few times before. To make a Hamster’s Nest, Snow and Colen shred up 30 to 50 phone books, yank around all the blankets and drapes, turn on the taps, take off their clothes, and do drugs—mushrooms, coke, ecstasy—until they feel like hamsters.
If you want to find Snow, you have to find Colen, or Snow’s other best friend, the 29-year-old photographer Ryan McGinley, who four years ago became the youngest person ever to have a solo show at the Whitney. That show, “The Kids Are Alright,” depicted a downtown neverland where people are thrilled and naked, leaping in front of graffiti on the street, sacked out in heaps of flannel shirts—everything very debauched and drug-addled and decadent, like Nan Goldin hit with a happy wand. Part of what made McGinley so famous (like Goldin before him) was that he offered not just an artist’s vision of a free and rebellious alternative life but also the promise that he was actually living it, through photos that looked spontaneous, stolen, of an intimate cast of characters, a family of friends, and in McGinley’s case, of Snow in particular. In some ways, Snow has been his muse.
“I guess I get obsessed with people, and I really became fascinated by Dash,” says McGinley, who shares a Chinatown loft a few blocks away from Snow’s apartment with Dan Colen, whom McGinley has known since they were teenage skateboarders in New Jersey. The apartment used to be a brothel; for a long time, Chinese men would come to the door and be disappointed when McGinley or Colen answered it. McGinley shows me his photos of Snow over the years, dozens and dozens of them. Snow with cornrows, with a shaved head, with a black eye. There is one photo called Dash Bombing that was in the Whitney show: a shadowy shot of Snow out on a ledge, tagging a building in the night sky, Manhattan spread out below him. It’s an image of anarchic freedom, one that seems anachronistic and almost magical in this city of hermetically sealed glass-cocoon condo towers. It’s as if Snow were an animal—prevalent in the seventies, now thought to be extinct—that was spotted high over the city.
“I actually don’t like graffiti,” McGinley says. “I was just interested in the person that would write their name thousands and thousands and thousands of times. These kids that would go up on a rooftop, 40 stories up, and go out on a ledge to write their name—it’s just, like, the insanity of it all!” McGinley smiles his clean smile. “It’s funny to me that Dash has become like a rock star, but he’s so paranoid. That comes from graffiti culture—like, you want everybody to know who you are and you’re going to write your name all over the city, but you can’t let anyone know who you really are. It’s, like, this idea of being notorious.”
And because notoriety is crucial to something much larger than graffiti culture, Dash Snow is becoming a kind of sensation. Young people poured out onto Joey Ramone Place waiting to get into his last show at Rivington Arms gallery. He had a piece in the Whitney Biennial—a picture of a dog licking his lips in a pile of trash and several other Polaroids. You may not be able to find him, but you can hear his name, that zooming syllable—Dash!—punctuating conversations in Chelsea galleries and Lower East Side coke parties and Miami art fairs and the offices of underground newspapers in Copenhagen and Berlin, like a kind of supercool international Morse code. Because the art world loves infamy. Downtown New York City loves infamy—needs it, in fact, to exist.
Remembering Dash Snow - via @awhitelodge @mrjyn
Remembering Dash Snow - Page 1 - The Daily BeastRemembering Dash Snow
Dash Snow, who rebelled against his privileged and legendary art collecting family, but became a bona fide art star, overdosed this week at 27. Anthony Haden-Guest on his meteoric rise and fall.
Dash Snow, the New York artist, who overdosed on heroin at the age of 27 in the Lafayette House, a hotel on East 4th Street, on July 13, was one of the most intensely watched figures in Manhattan’s hyperactive Downtown art world. So his death has had the same convulsive impact as that of Jean-Michel Basquiat who died one year older in 1988. “Things are in uproar,” said Sarah Braman, an artist partner in Canada, the Chrystie Street gallery, when I called to get a number for Terence Koh’s gallery, Asia Song Society, where I last saw Snow. “People are upset. Everybody’s in shock.”
Click to View Our Gallery of Dash Snow's Art
Snow and his coterie, primarily Dan Colen and Ryan McGinley, were usually described as art world’s comers—the so-called “The Bowery School.” Snow was the dominant presence, if by no means their best-regarded art-maker. Short, dirty-blond, with the hair of a boho Botticelli angel, a hobo brushbeard, and tattoos (including one of Saddam Hussein), Snow was at once bratty and engaging. And he had been the object of much attention ever since the publication of “Chasing Dash Snow,” a 2007 article by Ariel Levy in New York magazine that asked: At 25 he is a growing downtown legend, a graffiti writer turned artist with a beautiful face and a De Menil pedigree, elusive even to the two friends who created his myth. What happens if he’s caught?
Caught?
Well, Snow had a record. He went into juvenile detention at the age of 13, then lived on the streets for a while, and has been more or less cut off from his family ever since, not only the de Menils but his mother’s family. And the streets became part of what he was, a part of his growing myth.
The other part of the myth, of course, was what New York called Snow’s “de Menil legacy.” The significance of this was not that the de Menils were rich, which they were—Snow’s great-grandmother being Domique Schlumberger, heiress to a Houston oil fortune, which like the Hughes fortune wasn’t based on drilling but upon technology. What lent the Dash Snow story its special dimension, a dark resonance, is that Dominique and her husband were world class art collectors. They were purists, true believers in the spiritual function of art.
The de Menils housed their collection in a Renzo Piano building which they opened in 1987. They had three daughters and a son, all of whom have lived art-penetrated lives. One of the daughters, Philippa, and her husband Heiner Friedrich funded the Dia Foundation, which opened in 1974, and which itself funds such Sacred Spaces of post-war art as Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field in Albuquerque and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jerry on the shore of the Great Salt Lake. And it was another daughter, Christophe, a designer and greatly liked presence in the art world, who made the official announcement of her grandson’s death. He had, she said, recently been in rehab.
With such a family mythos—incidentally, Snow’s maternal grandfather, Robert Thurman, runs Tibet House, making Uma Thurman his aunt—it might have seemed preordained that Snow would enter the art world in some manner or other. But, unlike Colen and McGinley who were determined to make art careers, Snow had no such ambitions. But both Colen and McGinley saw that Snow’s raw, messy work—the Polaroids that envelop you in something like Nan Goldin’s young bohemia, a Downtownscape of affectless squalor and non-committal sex, the tabloid collages—was a good fit in a marketplace hungry for the raw, the messy (Think Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy). So Dash Snow became an artist. And an increasingly noticed one.
