“Now I come to a matter of dress. I went out this morning and I saw many new pieces of lace at Wolf's shop. If you cannot get them cheap or get someone else to choose them, then I ask you, sweetheart, to leave the matter in my hands. In general, sweetheart, I would really prefer at present that you did not buy anything and saved your money for the journey. You see, sweetheart, I shall then be with you and we shall be buying together, and if someone cheats us, then at least it will happen in company” - Jenny Von Westphalen to her husband Karl Marx In Cologne, March 1843

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243 Luz is delighted to present works by Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, and I.W. Payne at The Shop, Sadie Coles HQ from May 31st - June 22nd 2024.

With its back to Regent Street, the location of The Shop at Sadie Coles grounds this duo exhibition in the deep historical narratives surrounding urbanity, consumer culture, intimacy, and the interplay between public and private spaces.

Henkel and Pitegoff’s worn handbag interiors can be read as proxies for a cultural imaginary born out of capital’s capture of identity and a kind of Debordian conspicuous consumption. Their erotic charge references the vernacular of online secondary markets for luxury goods where the display of function is eclipsed by desire and seduction, and where the erotic capital latent in designer items is often slapsticked, thirst-trapped into a semantic dysregulation.

I.W. Payne's research into historical consumer cultures traces the intimate connections forged both amidst the aisles of department stores, and in their offices and back rooms. A gleaming shop window shows a mannequin taking a bath atop a plinth of neatly folded towels, the most intimate room of the house as a stage set for the high street. Luxury down the plug hole and into the sewers of Oxford Street - the fuscous undergird of a shopping district’s glossy body lurking underneath.

The essential deception and subterfuge at the heart of the commodity groups these works together. It is the mechanisms that create aura and imbue goods with the magical, the fetishism that Marx and many others have defined, that is central to how the spectres of these works navigate the complexities of modernity.