The Art of Fashion: Installing Allusions

The Art of Fashion: Installing Allusions
19 September 2009 - 10 January 2010
This autumn five top international designers will be presenting exclusive work in The Art of Fashion. With this exhibition Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen explores the boundaries of fashion. Fashion shows and advertising campaigns have had their day. Designers use installations, performances and sculptural designs and enter the area of fine art. In Rotterdam the sparks that fly at the interface between fashion and art will be revealed spectacularly.
At the heart of the exhibition are exclusive new works by five top international designers. The H+F Fashion on the Edge Foundation invited Viktor&Rolf, Naomi Filmer, Hussein Chalayan, Anna-Nicole Ziesche and Walter Van Beirendonck to make brand new pieces for this exhibition. The designers abandon the principle of a wearable collection and seek out the boundaries of fashion. The works will be unveiled at the opening of the exhibition on 19 September 2009.

http://www.boijmans.nl/en/10/press/pressitem/98

Walter Van Beirendonck

http://www.waltervanbeirendonck.com/

Freddie Robins

http://www.freddierobins.com/

UK Textile Knit Artist

Artist's Statement

My studio practice questions conformity and notions of normality, and intersects the categorisation of art and craft. I use knitting to explore pertinent contemporary issues of the domestic, gender and the human condition. I find knitting to be a powerful medium for self-expression and communication because of the cultural preconceptions surrounding it. My work subverts these preconceptions and disrupts the notion of the medium being passive and benign. My ideas are expressed through an exploration of the human form and have resulted in pieces such as "Odd Gloves" and "Odd Sweaters". These series question physical normality incorporating both humour and fear. The titles are important. I like to play on words to make visual suggestions: "Hand of Good, Hand of God" and "Skin - a good thing to live in". In "Anyway" I explore value and scale through the production of a large knitted sculpture made on CAD controlled industrial machinery. My most recent body of work, "The Perfect", further explores the potential of industrial technology. I have been producing knitted multiples through the use of a Shima Seiki WholeGarment® machine (a computerised, automated, industrial V-bed flat machine, which is capable of knitting a three-dimensional seamless garment).   These multiples take the form of life size, three-dimensional human bodies. I have combined them in a variety of different ways to create large-scale installations. These works question conformity and notions of standardization and perfection.

El Anatsui

http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/artists/anatsui/index.shtml

http://africa.si.edu/exhibits/gawu/about.html

Born in 1944, in the Ewe-speaking area of Ghana, El Anatsui, is today recognised as one of the foremost contemporary artists of his generation. Taking the broad spectrum of indigenous African cultures as an extended canvas, his central themes concern the erosion of these inherited traditions by powerful external forces and the manner of their survival and transmission into the present. His deftly-organised and sophisticated work represents an original synthesis of the many diverse histories of African art with more modern influences picked out from the prevailing paradigm of contemporary western art. In 2007 El Anatsui exhibited at the 52nd Venice Biennale with a site-specific installation. He transformed one of Venices most celebrated Gothic landmarks, wrapping the façade of the Palazzo Fortuny in a vast metal cloth woven from thousands of glimmering bottle caps. As part of the Big Art Project El Anatsui become the third artist to put his unique stamp on The Big 4, the installation that brought Channel 4’s logo to life on the steps of the channel’s Horseferry Road headquarters. El recently exhibited at the 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art.

Lia Cook

http://www.liacook.com/

Ilka White

http://ilka.com.au/

Kate Just

http://www.katejustart.blogspot.com/

Kate Just is an American-born Australian artist known for her process-based and tactile art practice involving knitted sculpture, mixed media sculpture, collage, digital print, and video.

In earlier, nature-inspired works, Just created elaborate, knitted figurative sculptures and environments to explore mythology and her own personal experiences. These included a tree with human arms and head, a woman descending into her backyard lawn, a corn field growing from a bed, and a woman turning into a laurel bush. In each, the seemingly appealing, vivid scene also communicated themes such as loss, transformation and the affinity of women with nature.

In more recent installations of mixed media sculpture and photo-collage works, Just mines archaeology, art history, symbology and religion to present viewers with a range of archetypal objects representing women's links with bodily space. These include a giant black egg hatching an ominous branch, a pink-tongued lotus plant, a triangular spider web, a group of glass vessels, collages of fictional surgical tools and a series of over-scaled clay-modelled, black keys.