January 09, 2009 — February 28, 2009
18 Wooster Street, New York

Rock on Mars, a retrospective exhibition of the work of Stephen Sprouse, will transform Deitch Projects’s 18 Wooster Street gallery into a realization of Sprouse’s rock and roll futuristic vision.

Stephen Sprouse (1953-2004) was one of the most influential fashion designers of his time and a key figure in the dynamic mix of punk rock, wild style graffiti, and street influenced fashion that characterized the downtown New York community in the early 1980s. He was one of the first to build on the influence of Andy Warhol to create a fusion of art, music and fashion. He continued on a course that disavowed any division among these fields throughout his career.

The exhibition will introduce Sprouse’s extraordinary pop-influenced paintings to the larger art audience. His paintings of iconic rock and roll imagery including stacks of loudspeakers, Sid Vicious with his pants down, and an Iggy Pop crucifixion, have rarely been seen. The show will also include a selection of the video works made to accompany his runway shows, examples of his fabric and furniture design for Knoll, and fifty of his most influential fashion looks.

Art + Commerce is pleased to announce the launch of a  new project by Steven Meisel: a signed, limited-edition of 1000 jigsaw puzzles. This special edition  is available for pre-order now at shop.artandcommerce.com .

Steven Meisel, fashion’s pre-eminent image-maker, has been visualizing the trends of every  fashion season since the 1980s. Along with his ability to cast the faces and characters that come  to represent the look of fashion, Meisel has a prodigious talent for scripting story lines that  reference and reflect culture. Meisel not only depicts fashion, he defines it.

The photograph on the jigsaw puzzle — a colorful, pattern-on-pattern image featuring the model Meghan Collison as a tatooed pin-up — originally appeared in the December 2007 issue of  Vogue Italia, a publication for which Meisel has created every cover and lead editorial story for nearly two decades.

Soul i-D  is the newest book offering from Taschen. It is a look inside of some of the most creative minds of our time. It is a collage of great images, creative and intellectual thought and is certainly a book nearly any person would enjoy. - Joe Dirosa

Life, love, and wisdom as seen by i-D

Alexey Kallima will present a new body of work Chechnya Women's Team of Parachute Jumping and Its Virtual Fans for his first solo gallery exhibition in New York. A refugee from Grozny, Chechnya, Kallima fled to Moscow shortly after the Russian invasion in 1994. The artist frequently references the effects of this turmoil in his politically-charged paintings and installations. For this exhibition, Kallima will present a group of new large scale paintings and a dynamic installation referencing the current Russian police state.

Although Alexey Kallima has moved beyond the traditional academic training he received at the University of Krasnodar towards a more expressive language, he acknowledges the monumental character and principles of historical painting in his work, which examines the ongoing Russian/Chechen conflict and his personal and highly political response as a refugee. The paintings and drawings depict young women in varying stages of parachuting that recall the segregated teams Kallima observed as a child. While Russian propaganda maintains that the conflict is over, the Chechen economy has been paralyzed and segregation is still prevalent. Kallima's work imagines a utopian world where ethnicity does not temper equality. His use of perspective and expressive brushstroke reveals his interest in representing the heroism of the Chechen people and his affection towards them. 

July 18th through August 29th, 2008
Opening July 17th, 6-8 pm
Curated by Amy Brandt

New York, July 8, 2008- Affirmation Arts launches their newly renovated space at 523 West 37th street and inaugurates the gallery’s programming with the exhibition, Garbage Picker! The Contemporary Artist as Chiffonnier(e). The 15,000 square foot space, designed by Peter Matthews AIA, houses a 2,200 square foot gallery, studios and offices. The building is situated in the west side’s Hudson Yards district in proximity to cutting-edge contemporary art spaces like Exit Art and The Baryshnikov Arts Center.  Curated by independent curator Amy Brandt, the exhibition features the work of artists Jinkee Choi, Dianna Cohen, Charlie Coolidge, Christopher Jordan, Portia Munson, and Maya Onoda.