ADELANTE /// || A DIEGO NÁJERA PART

adidas Skateboarding has worked with director and filmmaker Colin Kennedy to put together a six-minute skate part for Diego Nájera, welcoming him to the pro team.

 The opening few minutes of the video is a montage of nine adidas team members and ditches the usual fisheye style of filming often found in skate videos.

 Instead, Kennedy opts to shoot backwards, tracking the skater as he rides towards us.

 While the technique itself isn't new, it is refreshing to see it used in a skate video and brings a whole new feel to the clip.

 Watch below!

Justice || The Lost Beats And Instrumentals (7" Vinyl)

Sit back, hit play and enjoy!

Reginald Sylvester II || Journey from Streetwear Design to Fine Art

The latest HYPEBEAST Magazine Issue 21: The Renaissance Issue is loaded with intimate stories that shed a light on a new swathe of multi-talented creatives. One of these subjects is fine art wunderkind, Reginald Sylvester II. The New York City-based artist is certainly one of the youngest individuals to make a profound impact in the industry, continuously breaking convention with his visceral artworks that perch on the border between abstract and figurative.

 “Part of being a great artist is being able to reflect the times you live in. For me it’s important to like, when I’m going through something in life and feeling a certain way, to not just pass through that emotion and just to leave it but to drown myself in it and reflect that on the surface in some way," said Sylvester II. “I create off the motion. I create off the moment and letting that moment pass through my body and onto the surface.”

 HYPEBEAST recently connected with Sylvester II at his studio in Brooklyn’s Bedford– Stuyvesant neighborhood for the latest installment of their HYPEBEAST Impressions video series that delves into the mind of today’s leading art contemporaries. 

Watch the video below to learn about his transformation as a fine artist, designing for streetwear brands, and more.

The Crazy Story Of A Real Life Treasure Hunt || Short Film

This spellbinding short film tells the story of a real-life treasure hunt that starts crazy and only gets crazier.

 Well-told and endlessly engrossing, this is a worthy watch for those interested in the weird and the wild.

Nike Air Max Plus Documentary with Qias Omar, Mache, Emily Oberg and More! || Sneaker Icon

In Champ Sports first episode of Sneaker Icon, they explore the history and cultural impact of the Nike Air Max Plus!

 Sneaker experts give their take on the iconic Air Max, featuring the likes of Qias Omar, Emily Oberg, Mache, Leon Witherow as well as the creator of the Nike Air Max Plus.. Sean McDowell!

Have a peek below! 

George Condo Interview || The Way I Think

George Condo was part of the 1980s wild art scene in New York. In this video, recorded in his New York-studio, the iconic artist shares his life-long love of drawing and thoughts on his artistic expression, which he describes as “artificial realism.” 

 ”I kind of draw like you’re walking through the forest, where you don’t really know where you’re going, and you just start from some point and randomly travel through the paper until you get to a place where you finally reach your destination.” Condo studied music theory at college, but soon realised that it was too formal and rigid for him, and that he needed an art form that would give him more freedom. However, he still approaches his art like a musician, working fast and following the rhythm of the drawing or painting without “missing any of the notes.” The tempo, he feels, is very important when it comes to art.

 Condo wants his work to contain clear references to the different artists – from Picasso to Velasquez – they’re inspired by, but with a twist. His painting or drawings are about finding a way in which one can capture a person’s humanity through a portrait – capturing not just the outside but also the inside. Moreover, Condo aims to “turn negatives into positives”, portraying “the ordinary characters that make up our lives, whether it’s the janitor or the bus driver or the school teacher or the principal or the mailman or the truck driver. These are not the glamorous people that you see on the cover of Vogue Magazine, but they are what the world is composed of. And to give them a spot in the world is what I always admired about Rembrandt to a certain degree…”

 “I love drawing as much as painting, so why not make your paintings from your drawings, but literally have there be no defined sort of hierarchy between the two mediums?” Condo started making “drawing-paintings”, where you can’t distinguish e.g. paint from pastel, or a line made with a paintbrush or a line drawn in from and thus making the two mediums equal: “There’s no real difference between figurative painting or abstract painting, ‘cause it’s all painting to begin with… You don't’ have to follow any rules as a painter. If you’re making an abstract painting it doesn't mean eventually it can’t morph into a figurative one.”

 When a famous art historian asked Condo what he called the form of work he did, Condo thought of the description “artificial realism”. Artificial realism gives the painter the opportunity to go back and paint something in a realistic way while still portraying all that which is artificial in our world. In continuation of this, he finds that now everything seems to be “artificial realism” with the fake news that is all around us: “Art is the truth, and everything else is a lie.” 

 George Condo (b. 1957) is an American contemporary visual artist working in the mediums of painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking. Condo mixes input from art history’s masters – such as Velasquez, Manet and Picasso – with elements of American Pop Art. He distorts and renews this material so that it stands out and becomes his own: a kind of strange hybrid that blurs boundaries between the comic and the tragic, the grotesque and the beautiful, the classic and the innovative. As part of the wild art scene in New York in the early 1980s, Condo was close to painters such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, and worked for Andy Warhol’s Factory, applying diamond dust to silkscreen. Condo’s work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Broad Foundation in Los Angeles, Tate Gallery in London, Centre George Pompidou in Paris and Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo, among others. He is the recipient of an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1999) and the Francis J. Greenburger Award (2005). Condo lives and works in New York City.

 George Condo was interviewed by Kasper Bech Dyg at his studio in Soho, New York City in September 2017.

Planty Herbs || Come Into Knowledge (Full Album)

Hit play and enjoy this chilled, funky and full of heart album!