COURTESY @ARCANGELSURFWARE
Last summer, Arcangel Surfware, the lifestyle brand created by the artist Cory Arcangel, opened a flagship store and gallery in the artist’s adopted hometown of Stavanger, Norway. Now Arcangel is taking the show on the road with a lookalike version of the shop at Dover Street Market in Los Angeles in time for the first Frieze week in town. The pop-up operation opens February 16 and runs through March 6.
“The space that Dover Street Market has given me is about the same size as my shop in Stavanger,” Arcangel told ARTnews. “It is also weirdly about the same shape, which is kind of trapezoidal.”
Such serendipitous developments aided in the creation of a store that, while not an exact copy, is a close approximation of his brand’s flagship. There will be similar wall decorations, carpeting, and window displays. One highlight of the shop will be the debut of a series of neck pillows conceived for airplane use. The pillows are made out of excess fabric used in Arcangel’s recent series of scanner paintings, which consist of leggings scanned and then printed out on Ikea tables. “The work and the merchandise kind of merged,” Arcangel said of some of the items on offer at the store.
A version of the paintings themselves will be remade as a vinyl banner, and there will also be shirts with screen-printed images taken from the work. At the Frieze fair nearby, Lisson Gallery will be showing some of the originals. “You can go see a real one,” Arcangel said, “or come to Dover Street Market and buy a plane pillow from one of them.”
Arcangel currently has a show featuring scanner paintings at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg, Austria, and he will have work in the upcoming Sharjah Biennial 14. Global reach of the kind informed his idea for the pop-up. “The shop is so hard to get to,” he said of the Norwegian flagship. “I thought it would be funny if it could travel—in a suitcase, kind of.”