"When art and fashion get together, it crackles between skin and clothing.The exhibition, which was first shown at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, curated by José Teunissen and Han Nefkens, will being reshaped for Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg by José Teunissen and Annelie Lütgens, curator of Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.
Fashion and objects by Walter van Beirendonck, Louise Bourgeois, Hussein Chalayan, Christophe Coppens, Comme des Garçons, Salvador Dali, Naomi Filmer, Robert Gober, Martin Margiela, Francesco Vezzoli, Viktor und Rolf, Anna Nicole Zische, and many others.As is well known, art and fashion always come together where previously unaccustomed visual discoveries are made, where materials are tried out or conventional ideals of beauty are criticized. Fashion reflects our modern culture in a sensual, but also a conceptual manner. Designers have been exploring the boundaries of clothing and their significance since the nineteen eighties. The interreflection of skin and clothing, of body and garment is the golden thread running through the exhibition, showing itself in Dai Rees’s leather hides, Charlie le Mindu’s hair sculptures, BLESS’s fur wigs, Louise Bourgeois’s plushy stuffed head or Robert Gober’s wax children’s shoes.
A number of artists and designers deal with a reconfiguration of the body’s contours by means of provocative “sculpture-like” clothing: Rei Kawakubo (Comme des Garçons) designed clothing in 1997 with a distribution of concave and convex elements that run contrary to the basic shape of the human body. The Belgian couturier Martin Margiela developed garments that openly display the various “work phases” from the design stage and the fabric to the completed article of clothing. After the turn of the millennium, Viktor & Rolf as well as Hussein Chalayan, for example, presented their fashion shows like art installations."
