PURPLE RESIDENCE - PETER SHIRE - #1

American artist Peter Shire is a native and denizen of Echo Park, a neighborhood in East LA, where a predominantly Latin American population mingles with activists and intellectuals.
Long associated with the Memphis Group founded by Ettore Sottsass in Milan in 1981, he is the only American member of this iconic design collective. Shire's work includes public sculptures in Los Angeles and other California cities, such as a memorial sculpture in LA's Elysian Park.
He also worked on the design team for the 1984 Summer Olympics.

Shire ignores hierarchies and constantly blurs the
line between design, architecture, and contemporary art, which is possibly an influence of his parents - genuine American communists, artists, and politically engaged intellectuals from the 1930s during a time when the American identity was still under con-struction. Shire's object-sculptures and sculpture-ob-jects transcend established boundaries, forming a col-orful, playful ecosystem of his own and combining many circuits of artistic creation, whether a sculpture, a mug, a piece of furniture, a house, or a studio, including his own in Echo Park.

He brought his Los Angeles free spirit to the Purple Residence in Marseille, producing a series of ceramic artworks, like boats, mugs, and lamps, as well as paintings and wood furniture inspired by Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse, distorting the emblematic Corbusian monolith in Shire's own hallucinatory hybrids, borrowing equally from Cubism, Futurism, and the aesthetics of cartoons.

This postmodern gesture - "after modern," as he likes to say - is iconoclastic and fits both Los Angeles and Mar-seille. These topographically similar cities embody a matrix in which high and low culture emerge through their own history as thriving coastal metropolises.

A SPECIAL EDITION FOR PURPLE #40
THE REVOLUTIONS ISSUE
F/W 2023-24

PUBLISHER OLIVIER ZAHM
DESIGNER GIANNI OPRANDI
EDITORS OLIVIER ZAHM, ALEPH MOLINARI COPY EDITORS JEFF RIAN, KATYA FOREMAN, REINE MARIE MELVIN, KATE MOSES PETER SHIRE INTERVIEW BY EMMANUELLE LUCIANI

ALL ARTWORK BY PETER SHIRE, PRODUCED AT THE PURPLE RESIDENCE

ALL LOOKS AND ACCESSORIES FROM THE PUCCI SUPERNOVA
F/W 2023-24 COLLECTION
PHOTOGRAPHY BY OLIVIER ZAHM
STYLE SVITA SOBOL
TALENT LILI SUMNER
HAIR MANON MARTIN
MAKE-UP GARANCE MURRU

ALL ARTWORK COPYRIGHT PETER SHIRE, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

THE MORAL RIGHTS OF THE AUTHOR HAVE BEEN ASSERTED - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PUBLISHED BY PURPLE INSTITUTE, SEPTEMBER 2023
20 RUE THERESE 75001 PARIS
PRINTED IN BELGIUM BY SNEL GRAFICS
ISSN: 1766-8832

 

• 15 €

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