Review of New Cult-Like Images at Collezione Nancy Delroi, Milan
Dispatch from the opening of New Cult-Like Images or Come il patto tra adulti diventa un trattato di strategia affettiva, the Fifteen figures tableaux a show by the Italo-Lebanese duo, Desirée Nakouzi De Monte and Andrea Parenti, A.K.A Collezione Nancy Delroi and Wilhelmina Merante and Leyla Riggio.
New Cult-Like Images saw a staged scene, or tableaux, by Nancy Delroi alongside a series of debut sculptural installations by Merante and Riggio. The staged scene was the centrepiece, doubling as the set for a series of documented neo-realistist filmed moments involving the audience, premiering throughout the following week on a four-monitor CRT display. These unscripted films expand the ongoing film cycle of episodes, scenes, frames and dialogues launched recently by the duo, including You Kill Me Second & Anna Smoking Cigarettes.
On view by appointment until 9 July, it represents a pact between (four) adults, un trattato di strategia affettiva (a treatise on emotional strategy) a New Cult founded on the rhythm of wood, metal, FRP material and plywood. Today, as always, we celebrate despair by painting crosses and drinking red wine.
—
June 23 2025, 8 O’clock: Usual Monday evening, Milan is deserted. When walking down the streets, from the barely illuminated shop windows, mannequins dressed to the nines wink at passers-by; a couple of them look for a cigarette. I can't help but stop for a chat: a woman in military uniform and another individual in gauze, “Future”, insist on accompanying me towards the opening. I long for company - I also need a lighter.
Once there, beyond a wooden gate, a closed metal gate. Beyond that metal gate, more gates and wooden windows, and then, a room filled with undressed to the nines mannequins seated at a banquet table. Too busy alcohol-sinking, they do not turn around as I enter; their desolate body fat percentages are floating in a kind of ED arrogance permeating everyone’s pores and sanity.
The space is staggered by some cheap plywood furniture pieces, arranged as if there is something to hide: a body, a love affair, the true and ultimate meaning of Contemporary Art... for sure not the pornographic side of it, everyone in there is naked and careless.
On the walls, the works of Merante and Riggio, so-called “Metal Paintings”. Full and empty spaces signalling where to hold and where to release the breath: Greek Cross, Red Cross, Medium Shot of a Skeleton, A Rectified Rib Cage, Geometric idol, Rampant bird…
I need the lighter again, but, turning around, I no longer find my two friends: it seems the diners have grown in number, from 15 to 17; I read on the furnished paper sheet: Tableaux of fifteen figures, Every third thought shall be my grave...
I count up to three and Désirée appears, introducing me to the boudoir, specifying that in an hour there would be a performance where something would happen…finally. The Fiber Reinforced Polymer mannequin table seems now a bit inactive, plagued by appetite loss, the hunger drowned with previously overflowing glasses of wine and the lungs stuffed with too many smokes. Forks are lined up along the surface, untouched, like an obstacle course. Or a pew line.
A round, yellowish atmosphere sickens the room, sources of light are a resembling Bauhaus chandelier and a bunch of spotlights burning the air - I later notice a small rectangular skylight in the ceiling - perhaps where the Rampant bird entered from. 20 feathers counted, intact. Despite its flapping of wings, there is no breathing in there. Smells like Mephedrone.
In the previous room I had skipped initially four adults in black shake hands and prepare drinks blended with ice and berries. I wonder if they have agreed on it or it’s just mandatory for artists to wear total black outfits.
A row of unlit televisions reflects guests talking. A girl eating blueberries, then Andrea smoking a cigarette at the door. From the dark screens, the room multiplies, making me think about Borges' Labyrinth – I hope no one tries to enter the television looking for meanings.
After an indefinite period (punctuated only by the emptying of the wildberries tray on the central table), some real-life actors animate the inanimate room: dirty looks, bad words, and gratuitous violence towards those who arrived first and occupy the stage. Forks fly. It's cheesy.
The Ikea furniture of the early 2000s begins to exude squalor: we are all involved, but no one is there. We have lost our hunger and desire, too. No one feels like it but everyone crowds in, it's a feast of empty plates. An orgy of wet cigarette butts. The Rampant Bird gets a wing wound and flies away. The other sculptural paintings remain stoically unbothered,o not moving a muscle except for their tongues, with which they climaxingly spit out “pathetic yet deliberate compositions”.
The four adults are no longer taking part in the action: one for each corner they film the scene, silently sticking to their black clothes choice.
We are harming no one but ourselves; no difference between what was happening previously in the first and the second room: drinking, smoking, and talking about the guests on the opposite side of the wall. We sink together.
If I had not come with someone, I would, having being exposed, feel uncomfortable. LuckilyI recognise Militancy and Future, bending over the table, being bullied.
The latter is now missing an arm.
Images Courtesy of the Gallery, Author and Aitana Blasco
Essay
/ 26 June 2025 / By: Hollywood Superstar Editorial
Hollywood Superstar Categorises Seventeen Trends at Basel
This is the Hollywood Superstar's perspective-heavy appraisal of visual trends which emerged at Art Basel. Also included: The Swiss Art Awards, Liste, Basel Social Club and Maison Clearing. Many of the takes in the below article are reductive and potentially false. Viewed individually, these formal categorisations do not do justice to the work, time and thought that artists have imbued into their practice. And yet...! Identifying broad curatorial trends feels the most appropriate way of describing the clusterfuck of visual culture Basel produces. Culture that is, inevitably, recylced across Instagram feeds via curated and largely unwarranted magazine selections/highlights/carousels. The Superstar has curated this overarching narrative as a response to the phenomena of viewing art across two vectors; the in person fair and the online fair - the latter legitimising the former.
The Superstar is inclined to cherry-pick form and do neologisms.
Starting with the best: Basel Social Club (BSC) is a not-for-profit art fair that platforms young galleries (those under five years old) alongside major, avant-gardist and conceptual-focused galleries. The theme this year was "Bank" - heavy handed irony intended. The Social Club sets the trend for younger happenings across the city, The Swiss Art Awards included, demonstrating that art can still posesss a politically critical, tastefully subversive jouissance. At the younger fairs - visual trends manifested with no-holds-barred experimentation: "Rabelesian Grotesque", "Font Fetish", "Dolls", "Cafe Art Imitation", "Haunted House Immersive"...
One step up in the fair hierarchy is Liste. Liste presented a refined, far more marketable iteration of themes established at smaller fairs. If BSC was childlike, nïave, and optimistic - the larger scale and economic sacrifice required for Liste generated a curatorially adolescent atmosphere. Like a teenage girl, the galleries at Liste permeated a latent anxiety and a nihilistic pre-occupation with self-image. Their booths were good, no doubt, but self-conscious. None of the Da-Da ist abandonment and experimentation at Social Club. The Superstar wonders if the success of the non-mainstream, free fairs will have effect in coming years upon the neat Loosian floor-plan of Liste.
At Art Basel - the behemoth- any oscillations of aesthetic trends were far subtler. There was a very slight curatorial angle amongst the Blue Chips - a nod or gesture to something real. Between the household names on display; Rothko, Picasso, Hockney, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, et al, were artworks whose inclusion and content mirrored the zeitgeist of satellite fairs; Isa Genzken’s Neo-junk sculptures or Sylvie Fleury’s Lacanian pop-collages, Miriam Cahn’s amorphous flayed bodies or Picabia’s leering Americana; the pornographic displays of Cosi Fanni Tutti and Kara Walker; the Tromp l’oeil de-constructions of Jorg Immendorff or the braided canvases of Rosemarie Trockel. Most non-boring art could be found on the second floor. Names whose theoretical rigour and post-modernist attitude, not to mention fiscal success, act as a needed exemplar for (disillusioned) younger artists.
These groupings reflect a broader taste for art that is irreverent and satirical. This year the art which struck the Superstar resembled William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress. A works salience was grounded by a tangible, off-kilter beauty.
1 Dolls, or, The Return To Figurative Sculpture
The doll has become a major trope. The emptiness embodied by the maquette, the puppet and the doll in contemporary art is related to its form or function outside of the art space. She has come to embody dissatisfaction or emptiness alongside a semi-erotic appearance and ludic personality.
Figurative sculpture's return is signalled by the influx of doll-type artistic forms - the doll sits halfway between ready-made and full-blown, Grecian verisimilitude. Like prometheus, man creates something in his image to disperse his isolation. A doll, or avatar, has always been a source of transcendental comfort. Its resurgence today signals our need for re-assurance; a humanist symbol in the face of techno-pesssimism. Mannequins are both disruptive and irreverent. In the digital realm, they have achieved the status of uncanny combatants of silicon valley.
A recent suite of exhibitions includes; Gisele Vienne at George Kolbe Museum, Lucy Mackenzie at Atelier E.B., Maya Man’s digital series “Ugly Bitches”, Isabelle Frances Maguire at The Renaissance Society, Pam Hogg at Emalin Gallery, Diego Macron at Kunsthalle Wein, Pierre Hyugher in Venice, Kara Walker’s Fortuna, Sveta Mordovskaya at King’s Leap. Not to mention the greats: Soshiro Matsubara at Croy Nielsen, Pierre Klossowski, Rosemarie Trockel and, of course, Iza Genzken. Documentaries include Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s “Maintenance”, which focuses on the maintenance of sex dolls at a German brothel, and its forerunner, Love Me, Love My Doll (2007), about a group of men whose lives revolve around post-human interaction.
i) Children’s Dolls (humorous, found object play, relates to post-modern fatigue and consumerism)
Alex Bag (Galerie Oskar Weiss & Todd von Ammon) BSC
Ana Viktoria Dzinic (Nicoletti Contemporary) Liste
iii) The Craft Mannequin (a doll made more fetishistic by her materiality - Oskar Kokoschka’s doll, Alma, made of human hair)
Madeline Roger Lacan (galerie_eigenart) Basel
Asma_asma_asma_asma_asma_asma (LA house of Gaga) Basel
Mannequins in the cupboard at the Basel Social Club (artist unknown)
iii) The disturbed
Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, The 48 Hours of Kwik & Kwak (Isabella Bortolozzi) Basel
2 Font Fetish or Logo Worship
Artists have become fascinated with the seductive tyranny of the everyday as visualised by the conglomerate logo. Meme branding has pushed us into Post-Luxury, we can look to Helvetica Black revivalism: the American Apparel font.
Sarah Staunton (Galerina) Liste
Bedros Yeretzia (Diana Gallery) Liste
Georgie Netell (Reena Spailings) Basel
Monica Bonvicini (Galleria Reffaella) Basel
Jasmine gregory (Karma international) and (Clearing)
Mohamed Almusibli, Loucia Carlier and Sylvie Fleury (Stick and Poke curated by Alana Alireza) BSC
Georgie Nettel (denitment_zh) BSC
3 “Cafe Art” Imitation
Art which consciously mimics “low” or “amateur” painting styles. The kind once described as hobbyist, usually found on the walls cafés, whose interior has not been updated since the 2008 Financial Crisis. Taste, hierarchy etc. Actually, usually very well painted.
Rita Siegfried (Clearing LA)
Sam Creasey (Andrew Reed Gallery) BSC
Matt Keegan (Magenta Plains) Liste
Realist figurative painting. Everyone loves the figurative! In the peri-menopausal space between Post Woke and Woke 2 we still need it to be slightly subversive or horizontal to the out-right representational. Veering into the kitsch, this style of painting mimics the first and second faculties of what Umberto Eco calls "Ur-Fascism" : the rejection of modernity in favour of tradition and the perpetual re-interpretation of the past.
Jean Nipon (Clearing LA) Maison Clearing
Bill Coulthurst (Plymouth Rock) BSC
Francis Picabia (Galerie Isabella Bertolozzi) Basel
5 Childlike Regression Figurative
Works in which the formal style is childlike. The use of an nïave formal language throughout multiple works acts as a world-building exercise. It’s another indicator of figuration’s traditional language being diluted. What better way to deconstruct hierarchies than to appeal to their antithesis; innocence.
Maya Hewitt (Theta) BSC
Exquisite Corpse (Unknown Gallery) BSC
Gabor Pinter (longtermhandstand) BSC
Reba Maybury (Company Gallery) Liste
Matt Keegan (Magenta Plains)Liste
6 Modern Gothic (Domestic Cruelness is a sub-section of this)
Already defined by Contemporary Art Writing as follows:
“Modern Gothic is a mode or genre prevalent in Contemporary Art from the early 21st century to this day. Characteristics of Modern Gothic include the presence of banal, irrational, and transgressive thoughts, desires and impulses. Modern Gothic texts also mark a Marxist return of the alienated: the region’s historical realities take concrete forms in the city's banality of power structures that highlight all that has been unsaid in the official version of Modern history.”
Jenny Holzer (Spruth Magers)
Franz Burkhardt’s “Bus Stop” (Littmann Kulturprojekte) BSC
Paul Levack’s images of the interiors of Venice Casinos, exacerbated by the presence of a large casino table in the room (Hans Goodrich) BSC
Mia Sanchez (Swiss Art Awards)
Cedric Eisenring (Drei Gallery) BSC
7 Domestic Cruelness
Defined by Connor Crawford in his Liste booth. As a genre, Domestic Cruelness is preoccupied with how domestic space can reflect, trigger or embody psychic disturbance. Objects which should be comforting due to their association with the private realm - the sofa, the bed, the childhood home - appear in the guise of the mass-produced object devoid of auratic presence. As with Modern Gothic, the trope reflects tenets of alienation in relation to mass-individuality.
Mia Sanchez (Sentiment) BSC
Connor Crawford (Shore Gallery) Liste
Gillian Carnegie (Cabinet) Basel
8 Haunted House Immersive
Objects that could be haunted due to their antique effect are shown as animistic, shattered representations of universalist flaws. These are often containers of sorts whose hollowed-out interior spaces have a metabolic significance. Visually, they could be lifted from the decor of a Disneyland Horror house, they are a camp affectation appealing to pop culture.
Also includes the notorious wallpapered accent.
Alexandra Metcalf at (Ginny on Fedrick) Basel
Sophie Jung (Spielzug) BSC
Shamiran Istifan (Swiss Art Awards Winner)
9 The Phantasmagoric-Pop-Pysch Collage
This trend is an artistic investigation of the archive. How our minds archive time spent in domestic or urban spaces - projections of emotion time, place and longing. Found urban objects appear in mounted wall sculpture alongside disposable early 2000s family photographs, or ephemera one might discover, covered in dust, underneath a now-grown-up child's bed. Post-American dream aesthetics collaged with bits from estate sales.
The photograph is often contrasted with the found, unrefined object. Like Sveta Mordovskaya’s photographs, taken from 2005-2008. As Margaret Kross writes of Gregory's work, the pop-psych collage is “hot mess conceptualism”.
It makes use of the ephemera desired by the aspirational middle class; the glimpse of unrealised captialist desire is phantasmagoric. One experiences it as a child, yearning for the boxed barbie behind a plastic screen, only to become dissatisfied once it is unpackaged - the idea is merely a frightenening projection.
Jasmine Gregory (Swiss Art Awards)
Sveta Mordovskaya (Swiss Art Awards)
Sarah Benslimane (Clearing)
Zoe Baranek (Swiss Art Awards)
Samuel Haitz (Triangolo)
10 Tromp L’eoil, Tromp L’eoil, Tromp L’eoil
Self explanatory, probably the trend that will define painting most (if not already) in the next year. Something about false promise, failure and the seduction of illusion.
Lucy Mckenzie (Cabinet) and (Buchloch) Basel
Karolin Braegar (City Galerie Wein) Liste
Issy Wood (Michael Werner) Basel
Matt Keegan (Magenta Plains) Liste
11 Glitch-Romanticism
Taking the digital glitch and pairing it with a longing for sublimity, human connection and the romantic. Digital referents are contained within a emotional, deeply moving practice. Formally, artists make use of the glitch or blur: a shift, movement or break in the system - as a way of transforming ordinary subject matter. In other instances, artists use dated or nostalgic technology (glitch-tech) as a medium in their practice.
A fairytale tale told on a heavy set monitor or a painting with italicised, equally spaced font floating on the picture plane, as if placed by a text-box.
Ana Vik (Nicoletti) Liste
Matthias Groebel, (Mai 36 Galerie) Basel
Mathis Altman (Fitzpatrick gallery) BSC
12 Effervescent Grotesquerie
Abject subject matter depicted in effervescent hues. Paint seems to “evaporate” from the canvas as it is applied in washed out layers. The trauma of an abortion is exacerbated by the genre’s stylistic softness.
Evangeline Turner (A.Squire) Liste
Miriam Cahn (Meyer Riegger) Basel
13 Formally Rabelaisian
Gargantuan distortion. Rabelaisian means “to display earthy humour, Bawdy”. Formally, this manifests in rounded forms and cartoon-like human presentation. Style tends to fear towards kitschiness, commonality or “low” styles akin to Breughal’s representation of the bacchnicalic lower classes. Human figures convey joviality, but this happiness is filled with mirth.
Witt Fetter (Derosia) BSC
Hans Schärer (Galerie Mueller) BSC
Francis Picabia (Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery) Basel
Cosima von Bonin (La houseofgaga) Basel Unlimited
14 Brain Rot Carnivalesque Entertainment
Taking inspiration from the circus where freaks, oddities and societal outcasts are celebrated. Instead, presented to the crowd for amusement are the multifarious “brain rot” functions of the internet. The entertainment of the online masses is translated for the public.
Foreign/domestic mannequins by Jeffrey Dalessandro. Handmade mannequin of Luigi Mangione replete with gun and backpack. (Foreign and Domestic), BSC
South Park/Lacan by Marc Kokopeli (King of Venmo) ( Reena Spaulings) BSC
Urs fischer (The Modern institute) Basel
Noemi Pfister (Forspace) Swiss Art Awards
Paul Fritz and Virginie Sistek (Forspace) Swiss Art Awards
15 Fine Graphic Fetish
Fantastical illustration, usually fetish imagery, elevated by the artists attention to detail and skill with graphite shading.
Painting the context of one’s camera roll. Using the image juxtaposition of John Berger with meme-like screenshotted images.
Al Freeman (56 Henry) Liste
17 Ready Made Shapes
Cookie cutter Shapes. It’s unclear whether the vogue for incorporating patterns or ready made shapes into art directly reflects similar trends in fashion. One reason these shapes have been incorporated is for their immediacy, their cheapness is seductive, but, increasingly repetitive.
A classic high/low motif that sometimes pays off and sometimes appears like an art school interpretation of early 2010’s Word Art Shapes.
The abstract polka dot oscillates between a 2003 prada skirt pattern and a cheerful zombie formalist canvas.
Jutta Koether
Gritli Faulhaber (Maison Clearing)
Jim Lambie (The Modern Institute) Basel
Zoe Baranek (Swiss Art Awards)
18 The Self-Conscious Abstract Painter
Why paint with semi-cubist forms today? What does it mean? What is the point? Is the artist using these modernist forms as a self-conscious reflection on the shifting nature of the avant-garde?
These works are often successful for two reasons: 1) They utilise the succesful moniker of modernist abstraction while 2) The self-mockery contained in using said modernist forms creates an erudite "inside joke" for the connoisseur viewer. "Ha, Ha" the buyer says "This is a very clever commentary on dated notions of abstraction in painting - the gun is a substitute for modernism's brusque machismo energy...
Matt Gess’s Maiden Crimes 1 (2025) and Militia (2025) were shown at Récréations a show by Gnossienne Gallery alongside work by Nayan Patel, Sasha Miasnikova and Jordan Derrien. View the project on Instagram here.
*Maiden Otto*
There’s something that can only be brought out by being locked away: this is the tension that suspends Maiden Crimes. "It’s about yin and yang", said [legendary erotic photographer] Eric Kroll to Matt Gess, who had tracked him down to his kitchen table in Arizona. Balance is a notion that applies just as much to the climbing of chain-link fences as it does to the ecstasy of constrained compositions; these are all driving forces behind Gess's work.
Coming across a Maiden is a revelation that makes the word casting appear sanitised and crass. “You know what Eileen? I think [NAME] might be a Maiden…” We cock our heads, squint our eyes and pout our lips at each other, considering the idea like we just tasted something new. What’s your taste? Matt describes things like trespassing as ‘delicious’. Maidens are discovered, they walk out of the water of their past dripping with becoming; like every crime, they are unique. For example: Maiden Kirsten was sitting on the pavement of Kingsland road, “parked outside Greggs, lipstick defiant”,“she styled herself, quickly stuffing a circus flyer in her bra”. Charlie Osbourne emerged to Matt in another way: the theatricality of her rigid and heartfelt musical performances. These are subjects Matt observes from the anonymous position of an audience member or passerby- Maidens emerge having built their own kinds of stages: Kirsten with her pile of street cardboard, or Charlie at the ICA... Maiden is a project that poses seductively in the field of surveillance, anonymity and consent; no wonder Matt calls it a ‘license to voyeurism’.
*Maiden Kirsten*
His spare captions under his instagram posts are tantalisingly partial origin stories: “I saw Vivi working behind an Irish bar in Helsinki two hours before my flight back home. I asked her if she wanted to come back to my room and play dress-up.” Matt turns to me, “She works in KFC,” he says, breathlessly, “it’s perfect.”
And this is the key to understanding why the pictures have the effect that they do: it is a fetishistic approach to the details of living, of being, that makes Maiden Crimes the realest. The fetish is not the black patent heels, the velvet mask or the nipple cover; it’s not the leather glove, or the absence of a lower arm, it’s not the top of a flesh coloured stocking or the 1930s girdle, or any of the objects Matt plays with - it is none of these things in and of themselves. It’s the focus of an eye on a singular point, it is the tension of bodily concentration until one’s mind empties: not falling from the platforms; the explosion of a stepped-on grape; the expression of breath into an instrument and its contortion into sound, it is the narrowing in on a target until it is the right moment to squeeze the trigger… “you know when you shoot someone you say: I’m going to shoot this person. And it’s like what? With a camera or a gun? It’s the same thing.” This violent metaphor is appropriate for an artist whose alter ego Claudia Speed comes from the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto II.
*Matt Gess in the house of Eric Kroll*
Perhaps it is enough for now, to simply say that the fetish look invests objects with a magical coercive power over individual subjectivity. Matt’s work recognises the addictive determinism generated by Fetish. Careful arrangement of objects set in motion a sequence of events: female clothes on a male body creates certain life-situations. Cross-dressing in West Hollywood, Matt says, “I would find myself climbing over chain-link fences”.L.A plays itself, life seduces itself, one thing leads to another…
“When I was cross dressing and going to these strip clubs I’d literally be getting into these cars with these men and climbing these fences. It wasn’t always sexual. I love iron gates and what it represents of being locked away, and I think that kind of came from growing up in South Africa- the gated compounds with security and it was always just like quite fascinating and really beautiful because you’ve kind of got like these illuminated swimming pools and these big like chunky gates that have, like, electricity going through them.”
Apart from the strip clubs of Hollywood, there is another cinematic influence on the project. In his room in East London, Matt’s nameless Canary likes to perch on his stack of Alan Clarke DVDs. The Yorkshire-born director (1935-1990), whose later minimalist works on topics such as the miner’s strike, Road (1988); childhood heroin use, Christine (1987) and the Troubles in Ireland Elephant(1989) gave the violence of British Social Realist Cinema the Bressonian purity, precision and appeal of a finger dragged across skin, the sound of a dress being unzipped. The video of Osbourne in a prim buttercup-yellow dress spinning and playing her harmonica iconica, is a performance that would not have been amiss from the legendary party scene in Road. There is a clear fascination in Crimes not just with the acting in Clarke’s films, but the social-psychological aura emitted through the stripped-back nature of the sets. Their cheap plain kitchens and unplastered walls, like the pale, rail-thin bodies of Maidens, captivate in their austerity. There is a tension of set and character; history and choice: between the purple pub carpet and aubergine hair; neglected linoleum and patent heels, of weathered junkie skin against orange brick. Clarke’s protagonists and Matt’s Maidens are aesthetic creations that both tenderly embody and fiercely rebel against their surroundings.
We are in a borrowed mansion in Epping Forest, surrounded by chintz and framed photographs of an English family where the mothers wear pearls. Matt is preparing the room, where, in two hours’ time, he will shoot Maiden Rafe. Elusin’s song, silhouette, fills up with the room alongside the smoke machine- the shoegaze haze activates the power of the objects thrown on the bed: Mickey Mouse mask; Eric Stanton Book; black caged hoop skirt; patent heels size 10; a single white gym sock (photographer’s own). Ignoring the still life he had been arranging on the floor, Matt turns to the assemblage on the bed: “accidents are the whole point.” Whilst the shoots are planned carefully, there is a refreshing lack of career-calculation to Maiden Crimes, “I have to hide my phone after I post.” Matt tells me, “quite a few stylists have got in contact, which is nice of them, but a certain part of me is just like… fuck off?”.
This is why Matt’s photos stand out from the scroll; as we are inundated with digital pornography, the analogue fetish adventure endures…
When I was ten years old, I had a babysitter named Shira-Rose. Shira-Rose was in her twenties and part of an improv dance troop. It was 2012. I idolised Shira-Rose in the way that any ten-year-old girl without a sister would idolise a cool babysitter. She was funny and intrepid and spoke to me like an adult, even if I was only ten. She also dressed like no one else I had met before. She wore a lot of neon spandex and what seemed like fifty-thick plexi bangles on one arm at all times. She cut up her t-shirts and tied them back together to make braided cutouts on the side. She wore stilettos to pick me up from the school bus.
Shira-Rose had one pair of heels that I remember distinctly: foamy-looking rubber wedges in bright apricot with a shiny white patent strap. They were the perfect shoe for a babysitter on the move: practical, otherworldly and simultaneously elementary - elementary in their colour scheme and silhouette. Years later, I was scouring the internet for a pair of heels and found Shira-Rose’s apricot pair staring back at me from the screen. I bought the same pair in grey, becoming obsessed, not only with the shoes, but with their strange maker: United Nude.
United Nude was founded in 2003 by Rem D Koolhaas (nephew of postmodern Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas) and Galahad Clark, heir of the Clark’s shoe family. Their website contains a laughably aspirational blurb, citing heritage and architectural pretensions:
“As the brain-child of architecturally-trained designer Rem D. Koolhaas, the nephew and namesake of renowned architect Rem Koolhaas, the brand is guided by an unwavering commitment to pushing the boundaries of footwear design. Each product is a reinterpretation of an architectural object - an exploration of the possibilities offered by movement, colors, and materials.”
In the noughties, United Nude shoes were made in bubblegum pinks, hazy, eggy yellows and electric blues. They had patent straps as shiny as new cars; clean matte leathers like a psychiatrist's sofa. Mylar, PVC, and soft rubbers constructed a feeling of minimalist space-age. Campaigns featured hazy silhouettes with illuminated, glowing feet. The shoes were by no means athletic but displayed some level of corpo-athleticism, the kind that occurs on the floor of a sleazy gallery like the one Marnie works at in Girls. United Nude collaborated with Iris Van Herpen, Zaha Hadid and Viktor & Rolf. In 2011, during Miami Art Basel, they opened their Miami store and ‘gallery’ where they showed photos and sculptural works alongside their shoes. The perfect shoe for an exceptional babysitter could also be a perfect shoe for the aimless dilettante: halfway between the art world, fashion week parties and her own self-delusion.
Iris Van Herpen x United Nude (Source: United Nude Spring Summer 2011 UNCover Publication)
Koolhaas’ Mobius Prototype (Source: United Nude)
United Nude released a line of shoes called ‘Eamz’ in 2011, named after the leather office chair Ray and Charles Eames designed in 1956. This series of shoes featured heels, boots and lace-ups with a protruding steel heel that imitated the base of the chair. The shoe's construction created an illusion of a foot suspended in mid-air, as if the wearer might exist in some zero-gravity space when she slips it on. The ‘Eamz’ shoe concerned itself structurally with negative space, balance and stability. While contemporary clothing design doesn’t necessarily need to respond to the same level of practical parameters, the shoe, as it holds up the foot and aims to keep the wearer balanced, must consider some small feat of engineered function. United Nude shoes were a moving structure, carrying the wearer through the city, from hot pavement to air-conditioned offices to trembling dance floors beside thronging, open bars.
The ‘Eamz’ Shoe (Image 1: eBay, Image 2: United Nude)
Situating themselves within the world of avant-garde design, United Nude also heavily co-opted the aesthetics of futurism, which was rampant following the millennium. The conceptual holo-screen, megapixel or the flash of a DSLR is realised in United Nude’s ‘Lo Res’ shoe. Inspired by early digital 3-D rendering systems that Koolhaas used at university when studying architecture, the shoe took on geometric surface like a glitchy disco ball. United Nude also designed a model for a Lamborghini using the same system, displayed in their flagship stores alongside the shoes. Techno-optimism was central to United Nude’s direction, reflecting a fantasy relevant at the time, that to most of us now feels painfully tired and charged. Actually, Koolhaas recently contributed to the prototype design of Tesla’s Cybertruck. As tech and automation industries become increasingly adjacent to rising fascist aims, garnering the same optimism for a future of technology no longer seems plausible.
The ‘Lo Res’ Shoe (Image 1&2: United Nude)
On Flickr, I found a lot of images of the store displays. At its peak, the brand had flagship stores in New York, London, Miami, Amsterdam and Shanghai. The lighting was akin to swanky downtown clubs, walls lined with shoes nestled into grid cubbies engulfed in glowing LED hues. The store wall concept was trademarked by United Nude in 2009 and called the Wall of Light™. The LEDs were programmed to oscillate with whatever song would be playing inside. One Reddit user described their shopping experience in the Bond Street store as “utterly overwhelming, nauseating and hypnotising… Ladytron was playing so loudly I couldn’t hear myself think.”
The Lamborghini Model, Lo Res Concept Car
Having never visited a United Nude store or any store with such an ambitious concept, I can only fantasise about what kind of feeling a shopping experience like this would have left me with. For those of us born either just before or after the millennium and interested in clothing and shoes of the past, the act of shopping is almost inseparable from another, sometimes arduous and definitely anonymous process of scrolling. Pixelated square images replace the windows of stores that were once designed for consumers to absorb a message, concept or feeling --then buy something. While the stated ambitions of United Nude, to stand as some convergence of architecture, design, fashion and technology are kind of goofy at best and fall ostentatiously flat at worst, this level of considered world-building around the marketing of one product and spatial concept is something that I wish we saw more of now.
By 2016, United Nude closed almost all of their storefronts. The only store left standing today is in Amsterdam. United Nude still makes shoes though much of the vibrancy and bubbliness has now been replaced with safer silhouettes and lackluster beiges. The futurisms of early United Nude, the frenzy around the potential of technology, where shopping in stores was still a default on the precipice of an internet that would become a constant presence in our pocket, have quickly been replaced by rightful skepticism, malaise and nostalgia for something
much older. But the shoes themselves remain, at least to me, as rubbery relics of a strange, playful mirage before the storm.
