Banks Violette’s chandeliers for Celine festive windows

In the summer of 2007 – part of the heady, early-aughts era the designer has referenced in his recent Celine collections – Hedi Slimane curated an exhibition at Arndt & Partner Gallery in Berlin. Evocatively titled ‘Sweet Bird of Youth’, it gathered a group of young artists who were part of a changing New York scene, one of both decadence and rebellion. The movement was perhaps personified by the late Dash Snow, whose polaroids captured his friends and their exploits; other artists featured included Terence Koh, Ryan McGinley and Nate Lowman. 

Another was Banks Violette, a painter and sculptor born in upstate New York, whose works – sometimes deemed paint of the ‘New Gothic Art’ movement – riff on American motifs, from galloping horses to the stars and stripes of the American flag, often stripped to their essence and recreated in black and white. In 2022, Slimane reconnected with Violette, asking the artist to adorn pieces in his A/W 2022 menswear collection for Celine (an American flag by Violette, for example, was embroidered onto the back of a leather jacket).

Banks Violette for Celine Art Project

Now, in an unexpected riff on the festive window display, Slimane has once again looked to Violette – who is represented by Maureen Paley Gallery in London and Gladstone Gallery in New York – to create a major new body of work (14 pieces in total) to be displayed in Celine stores worldwide. Violette calls the pieces ‘chandelier structures’, comprising three industrial lighting displays that appear in varying states of collapse.

‘The works build, in a stop-motion fashion, from the stable to the broken, the glamorous to the dissolute; standing turns into a stumble, and a stumble ends itself nodded out in the corner,’ Violette describes. ‘[Martin] Kippenberger’s “Street Lamp for Drunks” re-read through an opiate-limned, Narcan-dependent contemporary imaginary [lens].’

On his ongoing collaboration with Slimane, Violette says he admires ’that even when the approach is deconstructed, there isn’t any critical remove or detachment. There’s a genuine sincerity to his investment in the things he admires. As a result, he can transform something that is permanently framed as ironic into its opposite.’