Welcome to the Château de Versailles, home of the finest art in the world, an elaborate fantastical environment where each room is more gorgeous than the last. It’s here that Japanese superartist Takashi Murakami is about to have a sort of retrospective show, displaying tiny to gigantic sculptures and spectacular paintings. You’ll recognize many of the pieces like the busty Miss ko², KaiKai and KiKi (standing on balls of flowers), and a new version of Flower Matango (the ball of flowers with vines flying out of it.) Such is the continuation of Pop art.

There’s also a new colored version of Tongari-kun (the big black mushroom headed guy with a cone hat), Oval Buddha Gold (the giant gold frog), and one of the weirdest pieces of art you’ll ever see in your life: The Simple Things (blob head with seven average objects set in fine stones.) The Simple Things is a collaborative piece made by Murakami and Pharrell Williams. Lots of money, lots of plastic, lots of color.

Behold the manifesto on this exhibition as written by Murakami:

For a Japanese like me, the Château de Versailles is one of the greatest symbols of Western history. It is the emblem of an ambition for elegance, sophistication and art that most of us can only dream of. Of course, we are aware that the spark that set fire to the powder of the Revolution came directly from the centre of the building.

But, in many respects, everything is transmitted to us as a fantastic tale coming from a very distant kingdom. Just as French people can find it hard to recreate in their minds an accurate image of the Samurai period, the history of this palace has become diminished for us in reality.

So it is probable that the Versailles of my imagination corresponds to an exaggeration and a transformation in my mind so that it has become a kind of completely separate and unreal world. That is what I have tried to depict in this exhibition.

I am the Cheshire cat that welcomes Alice in Wonderland with its diabolic smile, and chatters away as she wanders around the Château.

With a broad smile I invite you all to discover the wonderland of Versailles.

The photos you see below are all taken by flicker user Ganymede2009.

This show runs 14 September till 12 December 2010, being set in the Grand Apartment and Hall of mirrors, included in the tour of the Grand Apartment. For more information on tickets and all that fun stuff, head on over to Château de Versailles‘ internets.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies environment category.

Look at this amazing work of art. There are 6 of these, all of them looking very similar, but all of them being hand-painted. Individually. Oh my goodness they are amazing. And you can and SHOULD bid on them, because the artist who made them is giving 100% of the profit to the WWF. That’s the World Wildlife Foundation, the one that saves the pandas. And all of the other animals ever, because they totally rock hard. For real.

The artist’s name is Natronbomb. I spoke with him and he rocks.

Let me reiterate how amazing these paintings are. They consist of both spraypaint through stencils and regular paint with brushes. The pandas are hand-detailed with paint, and every bit of image is painted, not printed. These are individually executed, by hand. I can’t emphasize that enough. And right now, when I post this, the auctions aren’t even above $30 each. That’s total madness! You must get in there and make a bid.

For the pandas!

Find these prints for auction at http://shop.ebay.com/dmsrabbit/m.html – 100% profit goes to the World Wildlife Foundation!

Details from Natronbomb:

Ok peoples, i have created some new prints to raise money for The World Wildlife Funds keystone species relief. Keystone species are animals that are large, marketable, and iconic to their environment. These species are incredibly vital, because if efforts to conserve their species and habitat are installed, this will have a “trickle down” effect to the other species that also share that habitat. Basically saving keystone species is the most efficient way to deliver relief to the most amount of animals. Since i do not have a constant donation account (yearly contributions and such) with the World Wildlife Fund, they have asked me to set them up as Ebay auction format rather than post it on my bigcartel page.

“The taller the bamboo, the lower it bends” is a completely unique print set. Each one of these prints were hand-painted, stenciled, and are REVERSIBLE (if u are so inclined to hang it that way.) They are 30″ in 22″ and are signed numbered, and individualized by me. The Front and backs of each print are totally unique, and these babies look awesome in person!! Please help save our planets animals and get something really cool in return. These were created on 280mm grade archival print paper, and are layered and personalized with Montana 94 and Montana Gold aerosol, and Golden acrylic paints.

Each auction will begin at .99 and all of the proceeds of this auction will go to benefit the World Wildlife Fund who devotes lots of time and energy to the saving Keystone species around the world.

In my short but sweet talk with Natronbomb, I asked repeatedly how these works were done. He said yes, they had layers of spraypaint (done with Montana 94, and Montana Gold spraypaints,) and are painted (the panda bit) with Golden acrylic paint, all by hand. The paper they are done on is Archival grade 280mm print paper. Nice stuff. Really nice stuff.

Find these prints for auction at http://shop.ebay.com/dmsrabbit/m.html – 100% profit goes to the World Wildlife Foundation!

Look at the examples below, then go choose your favorite image and bid the hell out of it. For the pandas!

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies environment category.

Let me tell you about an illustrator from a land called “holy crap amazing.” This illustrator’s name is Pietari Posti. Straight outta Spain. Take a bath in the magnificent collection of colors and lines these pictures present. Each of them is mixed media, which means they’re probably take in and out and out and in a bunch of different processes, but holy goodness do they look refined in the end. If you’d like to know a tiny bit more info about a certain picture, jsut hold your mouse over that image and wait for the filename. At the end it will have the name of the project the image was from. Most of them are hefty clients. Like the banana!

How bad ace is Posti? Represented by several organizations in several countries bad ace. Now that’s pretty much the ace of badness. Goodness!

Represented by:
Debut Art (UK)
2Agenten (Germany)
Agent002 (France)
Pekka Agency (Finland)
Rock of Eye (Australasia)

Now behold this heavy collection! They represent the newest works of Pietari Posti over the past year (and a couple outside that because they’re just fantastic.) All of them are marked “Mixed Media” which means their secrets are under lock and key.

Truly the skill does not need a lock though as you can never get ahold of this utter magic, one can only work at it and hope that GOD giveth.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies blue and orange categories.

Behold, an aqueous set of photographs taken and produced by a really radically talented picture taker by the name of Mark Mawson. They’re so aqueous in fact, that they’re nearly all fully submerged. There’s several groups, some of them with a single photo, some of them with several. Discover the beautiful quality inherent in each captured bit of light floating in space, and the color, oh my goodness the color. What a masterful selection of elements.

Below, in order, you will see the following.

First, there is the “Underwater Pinups” set. This is a set of three. If I’m not mistaken, the model goes by the name India Rose. Second, there’s a set of 4 images that go by the name “Underwater Dance.” Then there’s a single image called “Dance with Fish.” After that, there’s another set of four called “Verity.” Finally, there’s a set of two with the model Ingrid by the name “Drowning.”

This reminds me of the underwater adventures of James Cooper. There’s spraypaint in them there water holes. That’s more rough though. The stuff you see above and below, that’s smooth. Weightless and drifting, deep in the water.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies Under the Influence category.

Inside these matchbooks is a fantasy. A fantasy in blue and white. Opened, stripped, and penned in by designer Madeleine Stahel from Zürich. In each one of these books you’ll find a new lovely vision of the future, the past, old friends long gone. Yoda’s not present though. Maybe in spirit. Devour their oddity, then keep your own books after you’ve fired up all your matches for furtherance of this super project.

Madeleine Stahel . Grafik . Schöneggstrasse 5 / 2. OG . 8004 Zürich. This project is called “Documentation of a failure”, I’m sure you’ll see why upon glancing at the very first book. It is an enjoyable, healthy, and important thing to do the same thing over and over again when you’re in this graphics field. It’s research, even when it’s a formula so simple as matchbook, pen, ink, strangeness from the inner workings of the outer spaces of the mind.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies bits category.

I am not even kidding you. That is the name of the solo show happening right now by artist / designer / wildman WK Interact. His name might be just “WK” now cause that’s what it says on the ads, but still, “How to Blow Yourself Up!” That’s what’s up. In this post is a basic rundown of everything that’s in the show. I recommend definitely GOING to the show though also because everything is so sculptural and needs to be seen IRL.*

*IRL = in real life. Reals.

WK
How to Blow Yourself Up
Opening Reception
November 7th / 8-11PM
November 7th – December 5th

SUBLIMINAL PROJECTS GALLERY
1331 W. SUNSET BLVD
LOS ANGELES 90026
t.213.213.0078
INFO@SUBLIMINALPROJECTS.COM
TUES — FRI: 1-6 PM
SAT: NOON – 5PM

Keep your eyes open especially for ingredients such as Madness and Intensity

99 Crosby Street
Mixed Media Assemblage
(Salvaged Door, Caution Barracade, Electrical Socket, Wires, Acrylic,
Enamel and Mayhem)
82” h x 68” w

“Emergency”
Mixed Media Assemblage
(Former Studio Door, Chainsaw, Boxing Mask, Air Pump, Alarm, Mischief,
Readiness, and Revolution)
89”H x 38” W

“Trap”
Mixed Media Panel Assemblage
24”H x 72” W

“Double Attack”
Mixed Media Panel Assemblage
24”H x 72” W

“Lock Yourself”
Mixed Media Panel Assemblage
24”H x 60” W

“Jump Out”
Mixed Media Panel Assemblage
24”H x 72” W

“Caution”
Mixed Media Panel Assemblage
36”H x 72” W

“Blow Yourself Up 4”
Modfied Skate Deck
Circuit, Synthetic Dynamite, Severity
36”H x 16” W

“Blow Yourself Up 1”
Modfied Skate Deck
Pipe Bomb, Battery, Resistance
36”H x 17” W

“Blow Yourself Up 3”
Modified Skate Deck
(Pipe Bomb, Trigger, Madness)
36”H x 18” W

“Blow Yourself Up 2”
Modified Skate Deck
(Dynamite, Alarm, Trigger, Circuit, Danger and Invasion)
36”H x 16” W

“Blow Yourself Up 5”
Modified Skate Deck
(2-Way Radio, serigraph, intensity)
36”H x 14” W

“Ex Cop”
Mixed Media Assemblage and supplemental panels
107”H x 76” W

WK
“Ex Cop”
Acrylic, Enamel, and Ink on Natural Canvas
72”H x 72” W
(this last one is the canvas face, I have a feeling maybe that it’s not titled Ex Cop – might be a mistake)

I will take the blue “Ex Cop” (shown below) if you want to buy me one. That would be fine with me. Everything else you’ll have to match up yourself or go to the show. I am encouraging you to go to the show!

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies DESTRUCTION category!

Not the kind of star map that you use to find Steve Buscemi’s house, but the kind you use to find the “Artie” constellation. As the city of Paris is often or at least sometimes called La ville lumière aka City of Lights, the wonderful design mind that goes by the name Clémentine Tantet decided to see it in space. And what’s more identifying of a city than it’s train map? So thus is this: a map of the Paris Underground made into a map of the stars!

Re-identifying a map is a task that should be given to every design student at some point in their lives, and even more than one time if they’re up to it. Mapping and re-mapping are extremely basic skills that every designer, big and small, should have always. One must be able to identify the components of a system, map them in a way that makes them simplest to dissemble and understand. For realsies!

The light city | Poster: Paris has many nicknames but its most famous is «la ville-lumière» (literally «the light city»; most often translated as «the city of lights»). I decided to show it, representing the paris undergroung map like a stars map.

All images La ville lumière: © 2009 Clémentine Tantet

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies gridwork category.

The paint on the face move that struck the fashion world like a cat strikes a slab of butter! “A Friend Of Mine” design member and photographer extraordinaire Lizette Bell created this amazing concept that’s just so simple it’s amazing. This “paint by numbers” is applied to fashion photography but I think it should be applied to every facet of life.

Paint your LIFE, everyone!

Paint it by NUMBERS!

This project was made basically in celebration of the 1950s tradition of paint by numbers. At first the lady has the excellent numbered spaces outlined in blue, then she’s got what appears to be very nice looking paint that really looks like it belongs there on her body. What does it all mean?

It means that GOD is in fashion. GOD has got a paint by numbers for all of us to follow, and in order for that to happen, we’ve got to be as fashion conscious as we can be.

AS WE CAN BE!

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies process category. There is a first step to everything. Sometimes there’s only a first step, but there’s also always a last step. Sometimes they are the same thing. And that’s what design is all about.

You know how sometimes it’s time to go for a stroll on Queens? Well sometimes it’s time for a bit of a jaunt in Dublin! That’s true, you know. It’s a fact. And with eyeballs like resident Niall O’Riordan, you’re bound to be clicking around too, it’s your duty! Photographs in this post are all from that fellow, and pay attention! This is how to document “unnatural” loveliness in the urban landscape.

Niall O’Riordan is a Dublin born photographer and artist. He graduated with a BA in Photography in 2002.

You can visit his website www.norphotography.com or follow him on Twitter >@botasky

This post is a user submitted bit of content. Submit your stuff or the stuff of someone you dig! Get published and blow up!

Artist / Designer Frank Gonzales is a process-oriented craftsman. He’s got his ins and outs on. As he paints, he decides what to do. As a designer, he leaves the windows open. If you’re in a rut, maybe it’s because you’re driving a car. Frank Gonzales drives an interdimentional spacecraft. Take a peek at his lovely bird set here, then see if you’re got a handle on space-time.

In his own words: I like to construct and deconstruct during the process leaving traces of my journey in the end results. Like life itself, there are elements of uncertainty, dialogue and changes that take place which can be both fascinating and frustrating to me.

Now incase you didn’t know, or didn’t notice the picture down there that’s just a pile of buckets of paint, you should be aware that these are all brand spanking new acrylic paintings. There’s nothing digital at work here, just paintings photographed by an camera. Just utter graphical loveliness.

This post is from the World Famous Design Junkies painting category. Straight up.

What up bluefaces! Here’s a couple new images from the Burlesque Design and Printmaking group. Yes oh yes the content’s the finest: Smurfs getting generally pretty much inappropriate, and Gargamel doing a neat kickflip trick on his skateboard machine! It’s amazing how much free stuff – in terms of humour – you can get from classic cartoons that tended to have odd, unsettling subtexts. These particular images are made for Minneapolis’s single skateboard-only shop Familia. Get on the board and push with two hot spankin new screenprint posters!

FAMILIA SMURFS PRINTS
Our friends over at Familia Skateshop (Minnesota’s only all-skateboard shop) know how to get down. They’ve enlisted the help of the one and only Todd Bratrud to get themselves Smurfed into the party zone. We have TWO new posters for you – one featuring a rowdy famiilia of Smurfs and another featuring badman Gargamel pon di kickflip.

SMURF PRINT
19 x 19″
8 color print on Cougar White paper

GARGAMEL PRINT
12 x 25″
5 color print on French Speckletone Cream or Relic Gold paper

I bet you’ve never seen Gargamel rip the sky a new one like that. He’s kind of been shy about his skills before now, but he got convinced to come out of the coping closet once he saw his blue-footed adversaries having a totally fun night partying hard. I’m hoping for a special edition Azrael “Smurfy Breakfast” print. Until then!

This post is in the World Famous Design Junkies bad taste category for debauchery.

[audio:http://worldfamousdesignjunkies.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/gargamel.mp3]

Also two minutes for high sticking.

This napkin right here is a convenience towel. It’s from a place called “Eddy’s,” it’s a lake resort along Lake Mille Lacs in Minnesota. It’s got a reel good idea, or had a real good idea a while ago. This particular towel is from the vast archives of “free stuff” my dad owns. This he brings with in his “hotel kit” which is brought along when it’s time to stay overnight at the casino with a free room or whatever he’s happened to win this month.

Check this lovely thang out. Hella type.

It reads as thus:

CONVENIENCE TOWEL
PROVIDED TO…
-REMOVE MAKEUP
& LIPSTICK
-CLEAN…
EYEGLASSES
SHOES
LUGGAGE
WINDSHIELD
HEADLIGHTS

COMPLIMENTS OF…
EDDY’S
LAKE MILLE LACS RESORT

Blue on white. I cannot resist a good illustration of a boat. Especially when it’s Eddy’s. This post is truly from the World Famous Design Junkies ephemera category. Don’t throw it away if it’s good stuff!

Let me squeeze you for a moment on a subject that might vex all of those bloggers who’ve thought of it: time. Post time, original made on date… expiration? Can you post something if it’s old? Can you post something if it was made a long time ago but was never published online before? It’s September 14th, 2009 right now when I post this; consider these things as you look at this poster from 2007.

Client: Upright Citizens Brigade | poster | silkscreened & letterpressed
An annual comedy event named “The Rejection Show” at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theatre in Manhattan. — Jon Lopkin

Ah love me some Upright Citizens Brigade. I recently found the first season of this awe-inspiring television show at a flea market in Minnesota for $2. Worth every single dollar. I found out just the other day that the UCB continues in theater form- these posters I was excited to see are a part of that. Stand-up and improvisation.

As for the poster: the letters… the LETTERS!

This post from the World Famous Design Junkies posters category.

Li Wei is a superhero. Li Wei is a photographer and a super-human. He has fantastic powers and belongs in the superhero league of JUSTICE. That’s what I think about him. His photos are fantastic! But not complicated. No, Li Wei is quite simple, and quite simply fantastic. You must explore his outer space antics! (Many of them being right here, in this post!)

Li Wei
1970 Born in Hubei
1993 Educated in Beijing
Now lives in Beijing, China

Contact Li Wei

Mobile: (0086)-13911960976
Studio Tel:(0086)-010 52028538
English service,pls call my assistant Wang Lang. Mobile:(0086)-13810511647
E-mail: liweiart@gmail.com, liweiart@hotmail.com,

Address:1-0704#,No.18 Building,Soho Shidai,Cuiping Beili Xiqu,Tongzhou,Beijing,China, 101121
Studio Address:800m east of the North Gate of 798 Art Zone, ChaoYang Dist. Beijing,100015

If you are in any of these lovely places, you’ve just got to stop by for one of Li Wei’s shows or one of the shows he is in with other people!

Solo Exhibitions
“The amazing mirror maze of the self” Michael Schultz Gallery Beijing
“Besides Gravity”, Mogadishni CPH gallery, Denmark

Group Exhibitions
Mouvement d’Art Public/Make Art Public (MAP), Canada
“The view from elsewhere” Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) in partnership with Queensland Art Gallery present; Gallery of Modern Art/Australian Cinematheque
“China Now: The Edge of Desire”,Maxlang and Lillian Heidenberg Fine Art Presents,US
“Action-Camera: Beijing Performance Photography”, Morris and helen Belkin Art Gallery,Vancouver
“INCARNATIONS”, Paris-Beijing Photo Gallery,Beijing 798

As it is the charge of some photographers and image-makers to represent the quality in everyday life, so it is the charge of Li Wei to show the ultra-fantastic.

A few examples of how to identify a Li Wei:

If it has Li Wei (yes that is him) smashed into a surface with his head buried in the ground or some similar surface, it is generally called “Li Wei falls to the …” — in this case, it is called “Li Wei falls to the France.”

If it has two people (generally Li Wei and a lady) together, it probably has “Love” in the title. The picture you see above is called “Love meets 15m.” I’m sure you’re seeing a trend of flight and highness by now.

Finally (but not all-encompassingly finally) we have the simply titled “Boxing.” In Li Wei’s newest photos (of which most of the photos below are), the titles become very simple, and the concept simply out of this world.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies photography and unnatural nature categories, amongst many others, I’m sure.

As Emigre turns 25, FontFeed celebrates with a big huge post (you’ve gotta click that), and World Famous Design Junkies gets buckwild. I saw this fantastically red book cover that you see above* and said OH my goodness this is a good cover. The colors. The colors are so lovely I can scarcely believe it. This doesn’t happen just every 10 minutes, so I said to myself then that it was time, OMFG!

Time for the very first World Famous Design Junkies color retrospective!

*If anyone wants to pick this book up for me, that’d be just super.

This book, designed and edited by Emigre co-​founder and designer Rudy VanderLans, is a selection of reprints, using original digital files, tracing Emigre’s devel opment from its early bitmap design days in the late 1980s through to the exper i mental layouts that defined the so called “Legibility Wars” of the late 1990s, to the critical design writing of the early 2000s.

Emigre No.70 is a must have book for those who missed out on all the excitement the first time around and for those who have been long time Emigre fans alike. Any graphic design library would be incom plete without it.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies COLOR category – imagine that!

It is a powerful designer indeed who can not only set type, not only illustrate, but also pull the entire day-glo library out and put it in a blender and pour the contents into a Diary Queen Blizzard of a collection of works called ICONBLAST!

Your friends and mine, Minneapolis print duo Aesthetic Apparatus, conjure up a vast collection of test prints from all across their print library. As each color comes from each different print project, it is the skilled pulling of each bit of each unfinished test sheet that makes for a good final piece.

Some unnamed street artists (unless you’ve got some good graffiti interpretation skills) let loose the colorsplosion upon some unsuspecting cargo trains on Broadway and Johnson in North Minneapolis.

A color fantasy as seen through the eyes of OG graffiti superstar Futura 2000 – NOTE: the first comment on the post is from Lenny Futura himself!

Designer Dylan Mulvaney’s three-dimensional colortastic font for Manhattan Magazine is slick.

Another adventure into Minneapolis street art, this time up in Uptown. This is part of a gigantic collection of photos from Intermedia Arts – layer upon layer of lovely, lovely paint.

Photographer Jeff McLane places a color chart in the desert.

International photographer super-deluxe Erin Nicole Johnson captures Toronto’s own Honest Ed’s.

Next, we’ve got poster artist Tyler Stout with this fabulous Flight of the Conchords screenprint. Basically a billion colors, all of them precisely sliced.

During a camera battle for a colorful prize I can only imagine has something to do with the ruling of the entire universe, Akif Hakan Celebi manages to photograph a collection of naturally fantastic architectural colors on the streets of Turkey.

In a moment of genius that almost eclipses the rest of this set of underwater pictures, photographer James Cooper finds the distribution of pink spraypaint to be a new experience in the H2O.

This is mine. It is my favorite. It is a painting I acquired at the estate sale of the late James Burnley. The nunery and churchery is unsurpassed.

Aesop and the Brothers Grimm stories told with a neonic fantasmagorioum of color from who knows what dimension, as illustrated by Yiorgos Yiacos of 12×2 Design Group.

Producer / Artist / Rapper Pharrell Williams collaborates with International Superartist Takashi Murakami to create this Art Basel super-piece entitled “Simple Things” — 26,000 individual fine gems direct from the rainbow later and you’ve got Jacob the Jewelers most colorful (and expensive) project yet!

And of course, a “gigantic” post on World Famous Design Junkies wouldn’t be a complete post without the flea market – this one’s in Deutschland!

Click on through to those other sides or enjoy the gallery below!

A baseball. That’s it! Isn’t it beautiful? This baseball hit the arm of one Dylan Lathrop of Unequal Design fame. He owns it now! Its just lovely, isn’t?

One dome dog down and I caught a ball. Thanks america!
@unequaldesign

This is the ball, just to show you. hit me in my right bicep during batting practice.
@unequaldesign

Check out more of the fantastic whirling-swirling world of baseball graphics by checking out the World Famous Design Junkies encounter with Futura 2000 – he likes the sportings and the photographings of the sportings. He also dabbles in graphic design and graffiti.

What a billboard combo. These billboards are for safe driving and fetal alcohol syndrome prevention, left and right. The one on the left says “Let’s get ice cream after you paralyze us” and the one on the right says “fetal alcohol syndrome. cured.” Aesthetically ironic.

Search Billboard for more billboard related projects.