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Certain types of painting evade distinct categorization: the moment you try to pin them down, you notice something in the corner of the canvas that makes you delete your previously held notions. That applies to Italian painter Enzo Cucchi. After a life spent at the center of the Roman artist community, having built a pathway between American neo-expressionism and the Renaissance, where does the septuagenariansee himself, his work, and his city?

The house that painter Giorgio de Chirico lived in (largely isolating himself from the world) is located in a centuries-old palace, with complex layers of self-historicization condensed into a domestic space. A time-capsule-meets-Wunderkammerdecorated in a bizarre pastiche of styles, Casa de Chirico is an expanded portrait of the Pictor Optimus—an avant-garde foe of modernity and the ultimate archetypal 20th-century artist.

For the past four decades, American born, Rome-based filmmaker Abel Ferrara’sfilms, such as Bad Lieutenant and King of New York, have always been simultaneously on the edge and at the center of culture. Now 71, Ferrara is more opinionated than ever on his newfound sobriety, the differences between New York and Rome, and the intricacies of Pasolini and Padre Pio—the subject of his new film on the rise of Fascism in 1920 Italy.

Berlin-based brand BLESS has been occupying a "third space" for over 25 years now, hovering somewhere between contemporary art and fashion, with intellectual, pragmatic, tongue-in-cheek products. As their turn-of-the-millennium aesthetics are discovered and mined by emergent generations of creatives, this essay takes input from a wide variety of voices, proving how their designer-as-artist medium was distinctly ahead of the curve.

In recent years, the term “preppy” has undergone something of a renaissance, no longer referring to the stuffy, old-moneyed, exclusionary world that the clothing and the people who wore it represented. In this bootleg, updated version of the ironic Official Preppy Handbook guidebook from the 1980s, we reclaim Prep style for a new dapper class appropriating not just the dress but the full package of mannerisms, signifiers, and curated experiences—to very different ends.

Dj Harvey has been a fixture on the dancefloor since he started DJing in 1985, going all the way from the phoneless freedom of those anarchic acid house parties to gaining deity status as an early pioneer of the Balearic sound. Captured at Ibiza's legendary hotel and nightclub, Pikes–an island within the island, where he goes by "cultural attaché"–he flaunts his playboy style and carefree worldview, as we pick his brain on the future of dance music.

Formerly known as boychild, a moniker that embraced myriad explorations at the fringes of being human, Tosh Basco now returns to a vulnerable, fleeting, porous self. Stemming from her intersectional identity, and entangled feelings of non-belonging and erasure, her performances are rooted in improvisational movement as a mode of survival and world-building—a subtle testament to the ungraspable nature of living.

After decades spent making art, Mark Flood has remained true to who he was in the 90s, as he continues to probe the basic precepts and structures of the art world—or, as he puts it, to “fuck the frame.” But where does the Houston-based artist situate his work and influence now, when his ideas of irony, performativity, and ownership have become commonplace among younger artists in an increasingly appearance-based world?

In today’s internet culture, everyone is a performer. But in the 70s, when artist Charles Atlas first started out making Super 8 films and collaborating with the likes of Merce Cunningham, Michael Clark, and Leigh Bowery, drag and rhythm were the stuff of the underground scene. Across a career as long as it is diverse—spanning from docu-fantasy to mathematics, from TV to TikTok—his lexicon remains one of raw energy and omnivorous imagination.

London-based VEGYN is something of a prodigy, having produced music for the likes of Frank Ocean, founded his own record label, and doubled as a graphic designer. Though he has distinguished himself within the electronic music arena, which is oversaturated to the point of numbness, he remains level-headed about exactly what it is he wants to accomplish, and the realities of making work in an often inhospitable world.