Daniel Arsham designs limited-edition cover for Wallpaper’s 25th Anniversary Issue

Throughout the last 25 years, Wallpaper* has borne witness to the rise of many creative careers. The meteoric ascent of the American multidisciplinary artist Daniel Arsham, over the past 15 of those years, has been one of the highlights, especially since his eroded, Future Relic objects and aesthetic are now instantly recognisable and synonymous with a cultish cool. Beyond institutional and gallery shows, his prolific creative practice includes collaborations with fashion labels like Kith and hip-hop moguls such as Pharrell Williams, under the Snarkitecture name, the collaborative design studio he co-founded with Alex Mustonen. 

To mark Wallpaper’s big birthday milestone, we invited Arsham to create our limited-edition cover this month, which features our very own logo rendered in the artist’s signature style (typically reserved for pop-cultural icons of the past and present, such as telephones, Pokemon, boomboxes and supercars). Speaking about the cover design, Arsham says, ‘The cover artwork imagines the Wallpaper* magazine as an eroding version of itself found in a distant future. The masthead has fallen from its normal position on the top of the magazine and is instead crumbling near the bottom of the magazine.’

The recognisable cover treatment is a poetic counterpoint to Arsham’s second furniture collection, ‘Objects for Living II’, which is currently being exhibited at design gallery Friedman Benda in New York City. Building on the first collection of furniture that Arsham produced for the gallery in 2019, these new additions see Arsham continue his exploration of structural, material and temporal contrasts in functional form. His new work features hand-sculpted forms, originally made in Play-Doh – one of the materials readily available to Arsham while he was in lockdown at home with his family last year, and a vibrant colour palette to match. The highly considered furniture offering, which includes a bed, dining chairs, a dining table and a sofa among others, showcases an exciting new direction for the artist, which we look forward to observing for many years to come.

Subscribe to Wallpaper* today and receive limited-edition, artist-designed covers on your doorstep every month. For digital-only subscriptions, a special offer of 12 issues for $12 /£12 / €12 is currently available. 

INFORMATION

Daniel Arsham’s cover is the latest addition to the Wallpaper* limited-edition cover series, which features a specially created artwork by a different artist, architect or designer each issue, available exclusively to subscribers.