SLEEK #69 - The Courage Issue

PUBLISHERS LETTER

Discussing our forthcoming edition at the editorial meeting in early March, we very quickly knew exactly what it would be about. The theme, we all agreed, would be courage. SLEEK is dedicated to creativity and innovation, which are the focus of everything we do. So it was only logical to dedicate this edition to this topic. The fact creativity requires courage is something Henri Matisse himself intuited as well – and it very soon got us thinking about Joseph Beuys.

Born in Krefeld, Germany, the great performance artist would have celebrated his 100 th birthday on 12 May 2021. And that’s not all. Through his attitude to ‘thinking’, Beuys came to symbolise a sense of courageousness in art and life alike. But ‘retrospectivity’ is not something we do at SLEEK – because for us, creativity and innovation are about the here and now, and the future.
And so, we hit upon an unusual idea. We invited 20 creative personalities to speak to us about Beuys, tell us how he inspired their creativity, and what they had learned from him.

The result is an impressive array of unique insights, most of which were developed exclusively for SLEEK. This offering ranges from interviews with Róisín Murphy and Helmut Lang; articles by film director Soleen Yusef and Max Hollein, director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and a ‘Beuys dress’ designed by Nina Hollein, and modelled by German singer and actor Lary.
And then there was Jonathan Meese and Michael Breitz, who created exclusive works in response to our theme, as well as dancer Kianí del Valle, who put on a special performance, produced by SLEEK, at the Beuys exhibition now showing at Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin. We hope that, as friends of SLEEK, all of the above will inspire courage and creativity in you as you tackle the challenges that lie ahead.

Happy reading,
Christian Bracht