Discover Wallpaper* November 2024: The Art Issue

Taking a hard turn from its traditional role as the custodian of mainly 19th-century French art, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris is staging the first contemporary exhibition in its central sculpture nave. ‘L’Addition’ is an exploration of depictions of masculinity by Elmgreen & Dragset that draws on the museum’s collection of figurative sculptures, reinterpreted in new work by the Berlin-based artists. As our newsstand cover suggests (and that’s a silicone model of a small boy, by the way), it’s an audacious and, at times, disorientating undertaking, one that profitably pits the present against the past – a process discernible in work created by other artists that feature in this month’s Art Issue.

Take Rachel Feinstein, for instance. For the Miami-raised, New York-based artist, capturing the wild extremes of her hometown involves creating vast panoramas that are rife with historical rococo and gothic influences. Or this month’s Dakar Biennale, where a new generation of designers in Africa and its diaspora are showing work that links old and new – like the Marrakech-based Younes Duret’s reinterpretation of a teapot that, he says, reflects a fusion between tradition and modernity.

Our limited-edition cover features the first foray into fashion by Jony Ive’s design studio LoveFrom, which has collaborated with Moncler on a collection of jackets that can be mixed and matched with a single down-filled base layer. Here, too, the designer wrestles with the past. Ive tells our Milan editor Laura May Todd that, during the five-year development process, he ‘became obsessed with buttons. It’s an idea that is hundreds and hundreds of years old, and maybe it’s perfect, but as a designer, you want to challenge that assumption.’

Buttons; a thread: finding connections is at the beating heart of this issue, an idea brought vividly to life by the collaboration between composer Max Richter and choreographer Wayne McGregor, whom you can find in conversation in our article, and the union forged between fashion designer Jonathan Anderson and artist Christiane Kubrick (wife of the late master of modern cinema), whose work we are honoured to document in a series of unforgettable images shot at the Kubricks’ Hertfordshire manor house. Eyes wide open? Good. Enjoy the issue.