Prada Enlists Damien Hirst for Moscow’s Prada Mode
PHARMACY CLUB: Art sensation and a longtime friend of Miuccia Prada’s Damien Hirst has been conscripted by the Italian luxury house for the sixth installment of its Prada Mode roving members club to be held in Moscow.
The format, which consists of a social club created to provide members with art programming, late-night music performances and dining, will take place on Nov. 12 and 13 at the Levenson Mansion, a pre-revolutionary stately building located in the city’s Patriarch Ponds area.
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Hirst will add his signature provocative art lexicon to the location, taking over the storied Art Nouveau landmark with a new iteration of “Pharmacy,” an installation that was first exhibited in 1992 at the Cohen Gallery in New York.
Nodding to the seminal work of art and the Pharmacy restaurants set up in London’s Notting Hill in 1998 — for which Prada provided staff uniforms — and at Newport Street Gallery, the third iteration of the British artist’s temporary diner will take over the four-story mansion with floor-to-ceiling medicine cabinets re-creating a functional pharmacy filled with furniture, molecule scale models, light boxes and wallpaper bearing catalogues of prescription medicines.
“I’m so excited to be invited by Miuccia to re-create Pharmacy for Prada Mode in Moscow,” said the artist. “I’m pulling out all of the stops to make this amazing, and the four floors of the historic Levenson building will provide the perfect place for it. I can’t wait to get going! I’ve always thought great restaurants can be art, and Pharmacy is a living breathing artwork, best filled with people and art as one,” he added.
Across the two-day event the Prada club will also offer panel discussions and nightly entertainment featuring performances and live music, to be complemented by dining and drinking experiences.
After wrapping up the members-only club, Hirst’s Pharmacy installation will be open to the public from Nov. 14 to 20.
As reported, the inaugural Prada Mode was staged during Art Basel Miami Beach in 2018. The following year the roving format touched down at Art Basel Hong Kong and Frieze London, while in 2020 Prada brought the members club to Paris and to Shanghai, where the brand invited producer, director and writer Jia Zhang-Ke to transform the Prada Rong Zhai villa with a site-specific installation called Miàn based on his cinematic work.
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