Gianni Versace’s 1991-92 jacket, featuring a Madonna and child embroidered in crystals, draws on the gold tile and opulent patterning of Ravenna’s Byzantine architecture. Part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s stunning ‘Heavenly Bodies’ Costume Institute exhibition, the garment joins icons from the Met’s collection in a contemporary reinterpretation of opulence. (On view on the Upper East Side through Oct 8th).
From Belgium’s colonial past to The Disney Company’s practices, Luc Tuymans’s past paintings have obliquely referenced the exercise of power and control. By contrast, his latest body of work presents fragments from his own life, including this ominous image of a zoo building and a jacket, which looks like a modernist abstraction plus or minus a body. (At David Zwirner Gallery, 519 West 19th Street through Feb 9th).
