ART & DESIGN

“Broken Floor”, 2022

Mount St. Restaurant floor

American artist Rashid Johnson has transformed the floor of Mount St. Restaurant into an enveloping site-specific commission, made of exquisite shades of Palladian marble, that allows guests the opportunity to experience an artwork differently – they are able to dine on it, walk on it and dance on it! The design for the mosaic, titled ‘Broken Floor’, was inspired by his ‘Broken Men’ series, which deconstructs images into fragmented pieces. These works reflect on the current discourse of the human condition, how we are exposed, where we fit into society and gender bias, but they also offer a spiritual journey of how to fit these pieces back together and reconstruct ourselves.

Table Lamps

Continuing the integration of art and design throughout the restaurant, the table lamps are inspired by the iconic 1918 Powder Box by the late Davos-born Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp.

“Mid Ocean”, 2023

Ink and screenprint on gessoed fibreglass

170.2 x 127 x 3.5 cm / 67 x 50 x 1 3/8 inches

Over the last fifteen years, collage has emerged as a central strategy in the work of the American artist Lorna Simpson, employed as a means of investigating the complexities of identity and representation. She often works with images sourced from her extensive archive of vintage issues of Jet and Ebony magazines, two groundbreaking Black-owned publications. ‘Mid Ocean’ (2023) belongs to Simpson’s Special Characters series (2019–present), in which female faces taken from mid-century fashion and wig advertisements are superimposed over one another, creating uncanny, dreamlike portraits. Immersed in a deep, oceanic blue, the fragmentation of the image suggests a disconnect between the boundless complexity of each woman’s inner life and the easy consumption of her superficial appearance, while its repetition reveals the power of visual culture in perpetuating stereotypes of race and gender.

“The Light”, 1960

Oil on paper mounted on panel

55.9 x 75.9 cm / 22 x 29 7/8 inches

One of the great luminaries of twentieth-century art, Philip Guston’s legendary career spanned half a century. ‘The Light’ (1960) was painted during a pivotal period in the artist’s practice, as he transitioned from abstraction to figuration. Throughout the 1950s, Guston had painted expressive, lyrical compositions, gathering masses of dense, bright colour in the centre of the canvas. Towards the end of the decade, dark shapes—later identified as heads—began to appear in his work as the artist sought to reconnect his abstractions with the material world.

Here, four areas of black pigment compete with radiant passages of red, green, blue and orange, bringing the bold gestures of abstract expressionism into combination with the weighty substance of real-world objects. Over the next eight years, these dark forms continued to proliferate, bringing the artist ever closer to figuration and, in 1968, to his now-iconic vocabulary of enigmatic, cartoonish motifs.

“Brace of Pheasants”, 1952–53 

Oil on copper 

10.2 x 14 cm / 4 x 5 1/2 inches

Lucian Freud stands as one of the most commanding and influential figures in 20th-century art. The grandson of Sigmund Freud, Lucian was known for his sombre images of himself, his friends and family, which were often placed in unsettling interiors and urban landscapes. Freud captured the raw essence of the human condition with an honesty that was both brutal and profoundly humane. Beyond his human subjects, Freud’s still lifes, often featuring animals – from the quiet dignity of a sleeping dog to the unsettling stillness of a dead bird – extend his fascination with life and mortality.

Painted during a winter stay in Northern Ireland at a hunting party hosted by Raymond O’Neill, son of Ann Rothermere, ‘Brace of Pheasants’ (1952–53) exemplifies Lucian Freud’s deep sensitivity to the natural world. Rather than trophies of the hunt, two pheasants lie entwined in a quiet, almost tender embrace.

“iPad drawing ‘No. 643’’, 2011

15/25

81.5 x 61 cm / 32 1/8 x 24 inches

‘iPad drawing ‘No. 643’’ (2011) is an early example of the late David Hockney’s digital drawings. Hockney began experimenting with the Brushes app on his iPhone in 2007, later moving onto increasingly complex and detailed digital drawings with the introduction of the iPad into his practice in 2010. Reflecting on the immediacy and new possibilities of this technology, Hockney said, ‘I know a lot about drawings and paintings, I’ve spent sixty years doing them. But this is new because of the layers, and because you can go back to them. You can’t do that on paper or canvas.’ With its vivid palette of bright emerald, saffron, tangerine and teal, ‘No. 643’ depicts a classic still life composition, rendered in a distinctly modern medium. Full and juicy oranges are shaded by a luminous neon light, whilst dots enabled by the iPad stylus create shadows that recall both digital pixelation and nineteenth century Pointillism. Reflecting on the ways in which digital technology has reinvigorated his practice, Hockney stated: ‘Picasso would have gone mad with this. So would Van Gogh. I don’t know an artist who wouldn’t actually’.

Acrylic on collaged canvas with marouflage

109.5 x 188 cm / 43 1/8 x 74 inches

Poured, flicked, spattered, smoothed and pooling paint characterise the surface of Frank Bowling’s ‘Shallowtrench’ (2014). Thinly applied in some places, and wrought in thick impasto in others, ‘Shallowtrench’ is a powerful example of Bowling’s fascination with the materiality of his chosen medium. Embodying the artist’s innovative and experimental ethos, ‘Shallowtrench’ is ambitious in both scale and scope: it presents a joyful study in the expansive possibilities of colour and paint.

Appearing panel-like, the fold lines and stitch-like staple marks draw the eye meditatively into its horizontal planes; neon pink and forest greens shimmer across a canvas that is deepened by a poured area of dark red paint. The horizontal crease at this point of the canvas is a remnant of how the 3m roll of canvas was stored and transported by Frank from the art supplies shop in central London, to his studio.

The title ‘Shallowtrench’ is a reference to the system of drainage canals that were used to regulate water in Bowling’s hometown of New Amsterdam in Guyana. These trenches were visible from Bowling’s Variety Store on Main Street, which housed his mother’s dress-making business and the Bowling Family home.

‘Visage de femme en noir’, 1941–1942 c. and 1945–1946 c.

Oil on cardboard

55 x 46 cm / 21 5/8 x 18 1/8 inches

French born Francis Picabia was a richly multifaceted artist, impossible to categorise. Although best known as one of the leaders of the Dada movement, he fluidly moved from Impressionism to Abstraction, from photo-based realism to Cubism and from iconoclastic provocation to Art informel.

‘Visage de femme en noir’ was produced during Picabia’s so called Kitsch era, where the artist would scour magazines such as Mon Paris, Paris-Magazine and Paris Sex Appeal and appropriate these glossy source photographs of attractive women. The disarming simplicity of ‘Visage de femme en noir’ whose white streamlined eyes and arched eyebrows, stand out again the full yellow lips, blue upper register and red shadowy neck, displays how Picabia took great pleasure in leveraging his characteristic wit and dexterity to master and mock canonical styles. He famously said, ‘If you want to have clean ideas, change them as often as your shirt’.

Untitled #581, 2016

Dye sublimation metal print

156.8 x 116.2 cm / 61 3/4 x 45 3/4 inches

Location: The Games Room

Since coming to prominence as part of the Pictures Generation in the 1970s, the American artist Cindy Sherman has spent more than half a century transforming herself into a wide range of characters as she interrogates themes of representation and identity. ‘Untitled #581’ belongs to Sherman’s Flappers series (2016–18), in which starlets decades past their prime cling to their youth through the glamorous outfits and stylised makeup of a bygone era. Inspired by Norma Desmond, the fading movie star in Billy Wilder’s iconic 1950 black comedy ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ the series extends an investigation of age and spectacle that emerged in Sherman’s work in the 2000s. Here, the stoicism of the protagonist’s expression and posture contrasts with the vulnerability of her aging body, fine lines visible through heavy makeup, wrinkled hands resting on sequinned fabric—a tender, tragic meditation on how identities wear over time.

“Landscape”, 2023

Soft pastel on linen

186.1 x 156.8 cm / 73 1/4 x 61 3/4 inches

Location: The Swiss Room

With its pale pink sunlit sky, leaning umbrella pines and elongated, spindly cypress trees, Nicolas Party’s ‘Landscape’ (2023) provides an otherworldly rendition of a traditional subject matter. Born in Lausanne, Party spent his childhood surrounded by Switzerland’s idyllic Alpine scenery, which sparked a lifelong fascination with natural landscapes. Similarly, he has retained an enduring interest in the history of landscape painting, particularly artists such as Ferdinand Hodler and Georgia O’Keefe who carefully straddled the boundary between abstraction and figuration. In ‘Landscape’, Party evokes many of the tensions he is known for; his subject is both familiar and uncanny, traditional and new. Layered, contrasting colours are deployed with great precision to produce depth; resulting in a composition that appears almost like a stage set, dramatically lit and symmetrical. Discussing his approach to landscape painting, Party noted, ‘When I paint a landscape, I’m trying to find the moment where an element that is recognisable … becomes a shape’.