The buzzy scene at rock star Alison Mosshart’s art show “No Slow Songs” at Nili Lotan’s boutique on Duane Street is a glam mash up of New York and L.A. reports JANET MERCEL
The sleek walls and abstract paintings immediately suggest a white cube gallery. But minimalist racks of ready-to-wear lining the walls and a turntable with stacks of records piled in a corner suggest something else is going on here. That something else is No Slow Songs, a solo art show by The Kills frontwoman Alison Mosshart, at Nili Lotan’s boutique on Duane Street. When Lotan offered the store, Mosshart’s immediate reaction: Let’s do this. It’s a fitting collaboration with the fashion designer Vogue calls “fashion’s rule breaker.”
Fashion and rock and roll go together like peaches and cream, and Mosshart’s opening is a perfect mélange of style, music, and Hollywood—we may as well be backstage at a Kills concert. (Mosshart dates Once Upon a Time in Hollywood actor Damian Lewis, and longtime bandmate, Jamie Hince, was famously married to Kate Moss). David Broza, Laura Prepon, Karen Elson and Kate Lanphear pass through—each here to toast the union of two tiger women everyone seems to orbit around Lotan and Mosshart, drawn in equal measure to their pull.
Lotan’s whip smart leathers would be at home on the backs of just about every person in the room. I haven’t seen this many faces I recognize from L.A. in the flesh since the last time I was in Malibu. Fitting, because that’s where this show began: in Hollywood. Mosshart met Lotan last fall at Chateau Marmont. Lotan says the creative synergy was immediate. Their artistic approaches share the same rhythms—an appreciation for rock and roll, a reverence for the arts, and fearless self-expression that made their connection feel inevitable. “We had the most amazing dinner together where we could not stop talking and laughing,” Mosshart tells me. “Basically, spent the whole evening giggling so hard we cried. I knew then she was someone I needed in my life.”
So, what was it about Mosshart that made Lotan say, this belongs in my world? It was instinct, of course. For Lotan, Alison Mosshart embodies the spirit of modern rock ’n’ roll that serves as inspiration—especially the free-spirited cool of recent collections. Lotan found out Mosshart was a visual artist too and the exhibition in her Tribeca space became the obvious choice.
“It’s been five years since I’ve presented a body of work this large, this cohesive, painted in one fell swoop,” Mosshart says. “I came home after a long time away and had a couple weeks to paint this show. I didn’t go into it with a concept or an idea about what it would or should be—I just began. The intention was the act itself. Being in the act. Stewing in the act. Seeing what would come.”
The result: a punky, poetic body of work that ricochets between raw impressionism and high-gloss glam. Chaotic collages pose next to works on paper in watercolor, graphite and acrylic, like GG BOOM BOOM. And…is that lipstick? It is—nine of the 31 works in No Slow Songs are part of the “Makeup Paintings” series from 2008 that Mosshart recently unearthed from beneath her bed.
“There is joy in fucking things up—where a painting got to the point of being technically good or beautiful—crossing over that point, punching it in the face, breaking into something else.” – ALISON MOSSHART
Mosshart plays with layers—paintings over paintings, photos, chopped-up poems, sketches, old canvases reworked and riffed into new ones. It’s intuitive, freeform, and raw. Thoughts and moods tangle up on top of each other. The process echoes her music: riffing, revising, being “grossly free” about it. There’s hiding in plain sight here, too. Behind all the layers: the mask of performance, of makeup and clothes. Intertwining reflections of her public and private selves. The spontaneity of her 8-year-old niece, Goldy, is here in the work, too. The fearlessness of a child creating, no second guessing, no filter. “There is joy in fucking things up—where a painting got to the point of being technically good or beautiful—crossing over that point, punching it in the face, breaking into something else,” Mosshart explains.
Lotan gave Mosshart free rein with the space and the show’s contents—full faith. “It’s not so much about the music, but it’s that free spirit on stage, the fearlessness, and the boldness, that I’m drawn to and inspires me,” she says. “It was Alison’s fearless self-expression in the world—and that laugh—that connected us to each other.”
Art, music, and rock and roll have always been at the center of Lotan’s world. Since opening stores over two decades ago, she’s built a brand that empowers women—not just through edgy, era-less ready-to-wear, but through collaborative partnerships that highlight seminal female creatives. Style, for her, is the ultimate vehicle of self-expression—and a reflection of one’s passions, like art and music.
I should know. One of my all-time favorite pieces of clothing was a black tiered silk Nili Lotan slip dress that I bought around 2008; I wore it until it was in literal tatters. And then I wore it some more.
For the past eight years, Mosshart’s digital gallery Chop Shop has served as a rotating creative drop—an ongoing online catalog and a way to get new art into the world. Each release marks a creative period, rather than an endless sale. The spirit is pop-up, but the delivery is global.
Before heading out of town, Mosshart stops in to see her paintings – her “eccentric children” – one more time. “It feels like the beginning of something,” she says. “It feels like the first act. I don’t know how it ends yet.”
“No Slow Songs” runs at Nili Lotan, 188 Duane Street through April 17.
