Paul Smith Blog

Monday 2 November 2009

I have been so busy lately that, looking through some of my photographs from my recent trips, I found things that I thought you might be interested in that I forgot to talk about at the time.
Whilst in Tokyo I went to see the work of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. The exhibition is called 'According to what?'. He is the artist that was behind the idea for the famous 'birds nest' stadium at the Beijing Olympics working alongside Herzog de Meuron, the architects on this fantastic project.

He is a very interesting and versatile creator. One photograph shows his love of traditional craftsmanship in this jigsaw of reclaimed wood from an old shrine. The other photograph is of bicycles which are called 'Forever' The brand Forever was in existence for many years and now seems like it won't be totally forever as from just a few years ago when many millions of people were riding bicycles every day they are now riding motorbikes or driving cars.
This piece is a statement of the word 'Forever'.

As you know I travelled to New York after Tokyo and stayed for the first time in a new hotel called the Crosby Street Hotel. This is a view from my window.The New York skyline is always interesting and impressive.

If you are in NY, the Kandinsky exhibition in the beautiful Guggenheim Museum is a real treat.

Friday 30 October 2009

I was privileged to be invited last night to the opening of the David Chipperfield exhibition at the Design Museum ‘Form Matters’ and dinner afterwards.

David has had a busy couple of weeks with the opening of the Neues Museum Berlin which he has been working on for 11 years. It was badly damaged in the war and was lying empty. David Chipperfield has rebuilt and restored this in a magnificent way.

The exhibition at the Design Museum highlights large amounts of work he and his team have done over the last few years.

Thursday 29 October 2009

Tonight (29th Oct) is the private view of ‘Headless Heroes’ an exhibition by Conor Harrington at Lazarides Gallery in London (11 Rathbone Place, W1). I own some of Conor’s work and originally discovered it painted onto a large gate in the East End of London and I loved it and managed to find out who it was painted by. Since those days he has progressed enormously and has already had one sell out show.

For many years I have been receiving an amazing selection of objects from a fan in America . these items are never packaged in a box but always sent with the stamps and address on the actual object. In Bangkok, Thailand, next to our Paul Smith shop we put on an exhibition of some of these items. It is amazing how precious they suddenly look when shown in such a museum like way.

Last week in my shop in San Francisco we had a book signing by Sartorialist Scott Schuman. It was an unbelievable success with 700 people waiting in line to get in. We sold 300 books in 2 hours, obviously the blog is incredibly popular and it just shows the power of the internet.

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