Listen below to the track Für Hildegard von Bingen off Devendra Banhart’s upcoming Nonesuch records debut, Mala, on March 12, 2013. Mala, Banhart’s eighth studio album, was recorded in his then-home in Los Angeles. (He now resides in New York City.) The album is inspired by Banhart’s fiancée, Ana Kras, a Serbian artist. Preorder the album here to receive the below song and a limited edition signed print. photograph by Mads Teglers

Devendra Banhart – Für Hildegard von Bingen

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photograph by Jonathan Leder

Ricco/Maresca Gallery presents Henry Darger: Landscapes. This exhibition brings together highly celebrated landscapes by the self-taught artist Henry Darger (1892-1973). Darger’s sumptuous and detailed landscapes are extensively varied – from bucolic and peaceful to dark and foreboding. When Henry Darger’s work is viewed from this singular vantage, new aesthetic, conceptual, and technical discoveries surface from the vast depths of the artist’s complex and mysterious oeuvre. A devout Roman Catholic, Henry Darger worked as a janitor in Catholic hospitals by day and gave expression to his private, imaginary world by night from his small rented room on Chicago’s north side. Over a 54 year period, he created his magnum opus, a more than 15,000-page illustrated saga, The Story of the Vivian Girls in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal or the Glandelinian War Storm or the Glandico-Abbienian Wars as Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion,(commonly referred to as In the Realms of the Unreal). The 13 volume manuscript is reenacted in nearly 300 watercolors and collages depicting the “adventures” of the seven innocent Vivian Girls as they lead the rebellion against the evil, child-enslaving, adult Glandelinians. Henry Darger: Landscapes will be on view until February 2, 2013 at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, 3rd Floor NYC. 

“I am half-sick of shadows” said The Lady of Shalott – Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1842. Max Snow’s newest work takes its title from Tennyson’s poem: a lyric ballad adapting Arthurian Legend. Cursed to remain alone in her island fortress, The Lady of Shalott is unable to participate in the world except to view its distorted reflection in her mirror and weave those images on her loom. Both the poem and the show serve to raise questions about society and the artist’s role, responding to the conflicting commands to create art inspired by the world and also to live in it. The Lady of Shalott will on view until February 2, 2013, at Colette, 213 rue Saint-Honoré 75001 Paris

Gagosian Gallery presents an exhibition of tables by Urs Fischer in St. Barts entitled Tables, Chairs and Arms. Continuously searching for new sculptural solutions, Fischer has built houses out of bread; enlivened empty space with mechanistic jokes; deconstructed objects and then replicated them; and transferred others from three dimensions to two and back again via photographic processes. The works to which the title alludes are tables that combine large resin-coated photomontages with multicolored steel geometric bases. The jokey surrealist montages juxtapose images both found and manipulated—a pair of sausages, a cartoon snail, a graffiti-covered wall, an open mouth, a Hong Kong supermarket. Blurring the distinctions between photography, collage, sculpture, and furniture, the tables are objects both aesthetic and useful, filling the gallery with a presence that is at once visually arresting and socially convivial. Tables, Chairs and Arms will be on view until January 31, 2013 at Eden Rock Gallery, in St. Barths. 

photograph by Javier Ferrer Vidal

Directed by Pierre Debusschere of Art & Commerce, this fashion uses an auditory collage of old Nirvana interviews interspliced with imagery from Raf Simons Spring/Summer 2013 collection. See film after the jump. [CLICK HERE...]

Visit artist Gordon Holden’s shop.

The War Between Lust and Self Implied Boredom is a new editorial by Los Angeles based photographer Carlos Nunez. See more photographs after the jump. [CLICK HERE...]

Kiss painting by Betty Tompkins