Mickalene Thomas.
Rob Pruitt, Hoarfrost Pandas
Rob Pruitt, Hoarfrost Panda (A), 2024. DROPSHOP.
Rob Pruitt’s work is characterized by a fearless embrace of the present, social responsibility, and protean versatility. His output ranges from glitter canvases of panda bears, 2,922 paintings of President Obama painted one per day for each day in office, an eBay charity Flea Market, a Hollywood-style art awards ceremony, and an ongoing daily Instagram calendar of personal and public events.
The inspiration for the Hoarfrost Pandas came from the phenomenon of hoarfrost, when moisture on a clear night becomes frozen and creates a feathery, fluffier frost, and featured Pruitt’s iconic panda immersed in the cool, glistening environment.
Mickalene Thomas, Din avec la main dans le miroir et jupe rouge
Mickalene Thomas, Din avec la main dans le miroir et jupe rouge, 2024. DROPSHOP.
The mirror is a powerful tool because it forces you to deal with yourself on a deeper level. Conceptually, paintings are like mirrors. They’re a form of creative expression by the artist. ‘This is one of my points of view on the world – I’m presenting to you a gift.’ With that, I invite viewers to engage with my latest work and explore the reflections it may evoke.
—Mickalene Thomas
Dropped in celebration of award-winning artist Mickalene Thomas’s show All About Love at The Broad Museum in Los Angeles, this limited-edition print employed a variety of printing techniques and unconventional materials that Thomas has become known for over the course of her career. Its elaborate composition centered around one of Thomas’s muses, Din, who has been featured in her work for over a decade. Out of the artist’s many sitters, Din possesses an impressive aptitude for transformation and effortlessly engages with her luxurious environment.
Kent Monkman, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle
Kent Monkman, Study for I Am Water, 2024. DROPSHOP.
Kent Monkman's gender-fluid alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle – or Miss Chief for short – often appears in Monkman's work as a time-traveling, shape-shifting, supernatural being who reverses the colonial gaze to challenge received notions of history and Indigenous peoples. Accepted and honored in their communities, individuals of non-binary gender were often respected healers, visionaries, and artisans, and their responsibilities to their community were important for ensuring their peoples' spiritual well-being. Contemporary terms that encompass this tradition include Two Spirit and Indigiqueer.
Monkman featured his alter ego in this series of acrylic portraits, scantily clad in her signature dreamcatcher bra and high heels, hunting for love and communing with her kin – the indigenous animals of Turtle Island (North America). With a lush painterly style, this series captured the gestural immediacy of studies created by old masters in oil, ink, pen, and chalk, suggesting a time on Turtle Island long before European contact. While Monkman is known for his large history paintings interrogating Western art history – including The Met's monumental mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People) diptych – with these paintings the artist offered an intimate glimpse of Miss Chief as a legendary being immersed in the unspoiled beauty of Turtle Island.
Se Oh, Moon Jars
Se Oh, Moon Jar 2, 2024. DROPSHOP.
The Moon Jar represents simplicity, humility, modesty, purity. These three small moon-jar-inspired vessels represent the cycle of life. These works, rendered in raw, high-fire porcelain evolve as the lip of each vessel unfolds like a flower. Each Moon Jar is made from a bone-white porcelain clay, with forms rendered to mimic the brevity of life, while at the same time, showcasing a resilience vitrified by fire, becoming an object that will last for thousands of years. These works will serve as witness to the many simplistic cycles of life that are yet to come.
– Se Oh
Se Oh is a Korean-American artist based in Los Angeles, California and Seoul, Korea. Adopted at 9 months old and raised in America’s Deep South, Oh draws from their personal history to create works touching on themes of resilience and existing in liminal spaces. Their work has been featured in print editions of Surface Magazine, Architectural Digest, and American Vogue, among others. Oh has had solo shows in New York and Los Angeles while also participating in several group shows throughout their career. Each Moon Jar was hand thrown and fired by the artist in their studio.
Joel Mesler, Pool Party
Joel Mesler, Pool Party - Joy, 2024. DROPSHOP.
Deploying words and images, Joel Mesler draws from childhood memories and life experiences to create works that meld his private impressions with cultural touchstones. Often evoking his youth in 1980s Los Angeles, his signature artistic style is characterized by bold colors, stylized patterns, bright figuration, and unique calligraphic scripts. Calling to mind diverse influences – from the imagined jungles of Henri Rousseau to forms found in 20th-century decorative arts – Mesler's works offer a wry, vulnerable examination of the place where personal and popular iconography convene.
Timed with his exhibition at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, Joel Mesler: Kitchens are good rooms to cry in, Mesler invited passersby to experience Pool Party, his upcoming public installation at Rockefeller Center, where they engaged with his balloon flags, adding a sense of positivity to their day. By transforming these floating words into editions in his signature taut Mylar style with master printmaker Robert Blanton and Brand X Editions, Mesler offerd collectors a chance to bring these joyful sentiments into their home.
Thierry Noir, Gold
Thierry Noir with the ukiyo-e Skateboard series, 2024. © Thierry Noir. DROPSHOP.
Thierry Noir’s vividly colorful imagery captured the zeitgeist of 1980s Berlin and has since become widely known throughout the world. With an artistic career now spanning five decades, Noir remains as active as ever on the international stage. The Gold series began in 2020 as a studious series of 16-inch tondo paintings, each depicting one of Noir’s playful signature characters’ performance of a sporting discipline. The next year, the artist created digital animations using this source material and the animations were installed on enormous screens in cities including Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, Seoul, Shanghai, and Tokyo.
In 2024, Noir returned to the Gold series with an exhibition of paintings at Phillips in New York and an exclusive collaboration with DROPSHOP – a suite of four ukiyo-e prints produced with the The Adachi Institute of Woodcut Prints in Tokyo and four new screenprint editions produced in London – the first editioned artworks by Noir in nearly a decade.
KYNE
KYNE, Untitled (Brooklyn), 2024. DROPSHOP.
I visited New York for the first time in 2015 and it was such an inspiring experience – the people, the art, and the energy. I felt like the bridge was a perfect image to reflect the time I spent in the city and one that works so well with my own style as an artist.
– KYNE
For August 2024's Drop, KYNE situated his iconic figures within the urban landscape of New York City, and by an equally iconic Brooklyn scene in DUMBO. KYNE’s ever-changing approach to artmaking has prompted multiple partnerships with Japanese streetwear brands and even Takashi Murakami. In his debut collaboration outside of Japan, the Drop also included two additional portraits: one in pink and one in orange, bringing KYNE’s style to the forefront of the American art market.
Cass Bird, The K8 Hardy Studio Dress
Cass Bird, K8 1, 2024. DROPSHOP.
Cass Bird’s signature approach dismantles the male gaze with sharp wit and an awareness of the performative nature of gender. The artist reimagined the boundaries of fashion photography in a bold collaboration with K8 Hardy’s Studio Dress. In this conceptual editorial, Bird captured Jenna Lyons, not just as a high fashion model, but as a feminist icon, reclaiming the gaze.
The K8 Hardy Studio Dress paid tribute to women’s workwear, inspired by the humble, utilitarian house dress worn by grandmothers across the world. Through Bird’s lens, this overlooked garment was elevated into the realm of high fashion, subverting traditional hierarchies of class, design, and femininity. Behind the camera, Bird is also a performer, effortlessly disarming her subjects and infusing her photography with playful commentary on the ways women are seen - and choose to be seen. Together, Bird and Hardy challenged and redefined the aesthetics of power and labor in fashion.
Peter Halley, Color, Nine Times II
Peter Halley, Color, Nine Times II, 2024. DROPSHOP.
For the final Drop of the year, DROPSHOP partnered with Peter Halley and LITO Editions for Color, Nine Times II, an exclusive edition of multi-dimensional artworks. The result of meticulous experimentation with new technologies and craftsmanship produced Halley's hand-painted textured surface digitally rendered and “cloned” nine times. Inspired by Halley’s Cell Grid paintings, a series that began in 2014, the series was conceived through digital processes — to create the texture, relief, and structure of the work — and then hand-painted. The signature palette of “Day-Glo” colors were mixed in Peter Halley’s Studio. The edition was then painted at the LITO Tech Lab — a large space in Austria. Each artwork required nine hours of technical engineering and printing, followed by 16 hours of work by hand.
The texture of Color, Nine Times II is informed by Halley’s use of Roll-A-Tex in his paintings (a low-budget paint additive seen in popcorn ceilings). Halley challenged LITO Editions to “clone" this material, repeating the nine individual cells on metal frames, which were then bolted together into a tightly packed grid, an effect heightened by the arrangement of each cell at a different level of relief. Reflecting on the work, the artist noted that “all nine panels have the same, identical texture.”
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