HYPEBEAST: Robert Wilson Features Lady Gaga, Winona Ryder & More in Moving Video Portraits →

By Gabrielle Leung

While self-isolating in Berlin, American experimental theater director Robert Wilson has launched an online viewing room of mesmerizing video portraits. After an influential meeting with Sony executive Akio Morita in Tokyo in the 1970s, Wilson has continued to create subtly moving video portraits with artists, actors, athletes, royalty and more. The online viewing room showcases an appreciation for stillness that has been an integral part of Wilson’s work for decades, ranging from portraits of Japanese kabuki dancers to Winona Ryder as a character in a Samuel Beckett play.

Key pieces that can be experienced in the viewing room involve Lady Gaga dressed up to mimic historical paintings in the Louvre’s collection. Wilson recreated portraits of Jacques-Louis David’s famed painting The Death of Marat (1806) and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière. The last portrait, titled Flying, is not rooted in the Louvre’s collection, but instead references the ancient art of Japanese rope bondage, Shibari. Under the supervision of Shibari master David Rickman, Lady Gaga underwent an hours-long bondage performance.

ARTnews: Robert Wilson Debuts Viewing Room for Mesmerizing Video Portraits, Featuring Lady Gaga’s Severed Head and Other Oddities →

By Andy Battaglia

Robert Wilson is in Berlin, in a state of isolation like so many of us, but the storied experimental theater director has found himself in surroundings that allow for simple pleasures far away from his home in New York. “I’m staying in a house in private quarters surrounded by a garden and facing a lake, so I can go for walks in nature,” he said of the temporary location where he and his assistant are holed up. “No one is here. I don’t go out.”

He has, however, opened a portal of sorts in the form of a new online viewing room populated with mesmerizing video portraits he’s made over the years—including one of a Japanese kabuki dancer and another with Winona Ryder as a strange character in a Samuel Beckett play. More will be added in time, all in an effort to make accessible a vein of work that dates back, directly and indirectly, to a prescient vision Wilson developed in the early years of the Sony Walkman.

Town & Country: Where Creative People Go to Get Things Done

Robert Wilson & Cristina Grajales, artist and gallerist, weaving their magic in his studio

“You looking for Glamour Closet?” was not the first thing I expected to hear when I arrived to meet Robert Wilson, but it was oddly fitting. The avant-garde director occupies a singular position in the art world, and he chose to set his home, and the operational arm of his Watermill Center, not in a loft in Soho or a warehouse in Red Hook but in the no-man’s-land of the Garment District. On the 10th floor of an otherwise ordinary building, he is surrounded by objects collected over a lifetime: Han Dynasty sculptures, an ancient Burmese basket, dozens of chairs. “It’s Bob’s mind,” says his friend, the art dealer Cristina Grajales, who recently persuaded him to create a collection of glassworks, his first love (the pieces were produced by the Corning Museum). Wilson likes to say he can work anywhere (“comfort is a state of mind”), but it’s here that he gets to play Prospero, the sorcerer at the heart of a creative universe.

Another Man: Robert Wilson Remembers His Close Friend Robert Mapplethorpe

As Robert Mapplethorpe selected by Robert Wilson opens at Galerie Thomas Schulte, the avant-garde theatre director and designer remembers his close friend and collaborator.

"The Hat Makes The Man" Opens Tonight at the Max Ernst Museum Brühl

“Some nearly fifty years after he first created his surrealist sensation ‘Deafman Glance,’ Robert Wilson tips his hat to his mentor Max Ernst. Wilson’s staged theatrical performances, in the words of surrealist writer Louis Aragon, are ‘what we others, who fathered surrealism, what we dreamed it might become after us, beyond us.’ No mere retrospective or remembrance, this exhibition is more of a collaboration between two of the world’s quintessential dreamers.

The theme of Wilson’s exhibition reflects his wish to infuse the museum with the spirit of Ernst and that of the Watermill Center, the artists’ community where Wilson shares his personal collection of art and artifacts with the public, and nurtures the creativity of young and emerging artists. The exhibition clearly conveys Wilsons creative processes, featuring a selection of objects that serve as the raw material from which the artist draws his inspiration in many of the same ways Max Ernst drew inspiration from his own diverse collection.

Reminiscent of great cabinets of curiosities—especially the collected artifacts of André Breton and Max Ernst—this exhibition tells us less about the objects themselves than about the great artists whose dreams were initiated by them.”

— Noah Khoshbin, Curator

Exhibition Concept and Design: Robert Wilson - Design Collaboration: Marie de Testa - Curator: Noah Khoshbin - Lighting Design: Scott Bolman - Sound Design: Dario Felli - Registrar and Collection Consultant: Christian Clement - Max Ernst Museum Brühl: Achim Sommer, Friederike Voßkamp, Jürgen Pech

"Black and White" exhibition on display in NYC from Oct. 1 through 24, 2015

Black and White at The National Arts Club is on for another 3 days. It's free and open to the public.

With William Kentridge at the LICHTSICHT biennial in Bad Rothenfelde

Last night a selection of my video portraits was projected on a giant, impressive 400-meter long wall of a former salina in Bad Rothenfelde, Germany. This is part of the lichtsicht biennial, curated by the one and only Peter Weibel. One of my fellow artists in the selection there was William Kentridge, and we had a fun conversation over dinner. The projection biennial, which includes many more wonderful artists is up until February next year.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I just received "Living Pictures," a short film about my video portraits by Jakub Jahn. Enjoy!