F rom 28th June to 12th July 2023, Louis Vuitton and Sotheby’s, the world’s premier destination for art and luxury, are collaborating for a dedicated auction, featuring 22 unique artist-designed Louis Vuitton Artycapucines bags – each one exceptionally remade, signed and presented in a Monogram-covered Louis Vuitton Boîte Chapeau, to benefit a diverse range of charities and NGOs.
The Artycapucines Collection gives leading contemporary artists the opportunity to bring their unique visions to Louis Vuitton’s timeless and feminine classic: the Capucines bag. Named after Rue Neuve-des-Capucines, the Parisian street on which Louis Vuitton opened his first store in 1854, the Capucines’ distinctive design has provided an ideal blank canvas for the creativity of 24 international artists in the four annual Artycapucines collections released since 2019. Here we explore the creations from two of the 22 artists collaborating on the sale.
Ugo Rondinone
Opting to use color as the main attraction for his Artycapucines, the artist chose two archetypal symbols that he uses in his work: the clown and the rainbow. As a recognisable nonbinary character, the clown is designed to entertain large audiences, something he inverts in his work, while the rainbow is a communal archetype for unity and peace and refers equally to the gay liberation movement.
The stunning harlequin pattern on Rondinone’s bag is created by painstakingly hand-embroidering nearly 15,000 small beads to the bag’s leather body to create a sense of volume, a process that takes over 100 hours for each bag. Among the nearly 500 beads in each diamond are 3D-printed flowers inspired by a series of sculptures produced by Rondinone in 1988, and reminiscent of those in the Louis Vuitton Monogram pattern. The handle is a hand-crafted translucent resin, designed so that in bright light its colors are “projected” onto the bag’s flap.
“My work is embedded in an observation in nature and its relation to the human condition.” Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone is recognized as one of the major voices of his generation, an artist who composes searing meditations, borrowing from ancient and modern cultural sources and exuding pathos and humor.
Tschabalala Self
Tschabalala Self’s Artycapucines bag, initially released in 2019, uses 19 different types of leather – much upcycled from Louis Vuitton ateliers – to create a remarkable and playful patchwork design.
The leather pieces’ different shapes are based upon Self’s deconstruction of Louis Vuitton’s iconic Monogram pattern and attached using deliberately imperfect stitching, the layers of hanging threads instigating an unconventional dialogue with the bag’s perfectly crafted exterior.
Born in Harlem, New York, in 1990, Tschabalala Self graduated from Yale School of Art in 2015. Using painting, printmaking, and sewing, Self creates multilayered representations of the Black female body that explore its iconographic significance in contemporary US culture, alongside its emotional, physical and psychological impact.
“I started thinking more critically about what’s the most exciting aspect of the paintings and I thought well it’s not so much the figures. It’s more the deconstruction of a form and building it back up again. My idea was to apply that same way of thinking, breaking the logo down to different elements”
The other artists involved in the project are Amélie Bertrand, Daniel Buren, Sam Falls, Urs Fischer, Gregor, Hildebrandt, Donna Huanca, Huang Yuxing, Alex Israel, Liu Wei, Peter Marino, Beatriz Milhazes, Vik Muniz, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Park Seo-Bo, Paola Pivi, Josh Smith, Jonas Wood, Kennedy Yanko, Zeng Fanzhi, and Zhao Zhao.
Explore the full collection of bags, and register to bid here.
