Kanye West made his first public appearance yesterday since being hospitalized last month, and it was an exhibition of furniture designed by Rick Owens at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles that got him out of the house.
The outing was only semi-public, however, as “Rick Owens: Furniture” doesn’t officially open until December 17, so it appears he got a special preview of the exhibition during installation at the museum.
A candid photo originally posted to Instagram by artist Giovanni Leonardo Bassan shows West sitting in an Owens-designed chair that isn’t yet completely unboxed from its shipping crate.
He’s sporting a new blonde look, and what appears to be a sweatshirt from his own Yeezy Fall 2016 collection.
Another photo that appeared on Bassan’s Snapchat shows West inspecting an unidentified fur-covered object with Michèle Lamy, Owens’s partner and collaborator.
As Owens told the New York Times last month, their furniture pieces are inspired by Brutalism, architecture by Robert Mallet-Stevens and Marcel Breuer, and German bunkers, besides monochrome painting, minimalism, and avant-garde dance.
The rapper and aspiring furniture designer was voluntarily hospitalized in Los Angeles on November 21 for sleep deprivation and exhaustion. A source close to West’s family speculated to People that the cause for his hospitalization may have been a brutal touring schedule, combined with lack of support from wife Kim Kardashian West, who did not accompany her husband on tour as planned after being robbed at gunpoint in Paris in early October.
Sources also emphasized that November is generally a tough month for West, since his mother died in November 2007. He was discharged on November 30, and it seems that now he is turning to a bit of museum therapy to help him relax.