Art is fashion

Exhibition

Drawing, installation, photography, video

Art is fashion

Past: November 23, 2011 → January 14, 2012

The Taïss Gallery and the Analix Forever Gallery reunite for the second time this year to propose an exhibition that highlights several of the connections woven every day between art and fashion. Very specific connections, illustrated by the title, Art is Fashion, or how art makes fashion, is itself fashion- clothing, skin, cosmetics, aesthetics, politics, poetics, transformation of the reality of life and body in order to render them on a daily basis seductive to our eyes and attractive to our souls, sometimes troubling, even provocative, and always complex.

The Taïss Gallery has a strong, albeit new, interest in the multiple connections between art and fashion, whereas a long history links the Analix Forever Gallery to fashion, a history having notably produced the magazine Londerzeel (Kris Van Assche, artistic director) which will be presented during the exhibition.

The ten French and international artists chosen for the exhibition at the Taïss Gallery, Conrad Bakker (USA), Isabelle Chapuis (France), Mat Collishaw (UK), Éric Emo (France), Mounir Fatmi (Maroc), Marie Hendricks (Pays-Bas), Jean-Michel Pancin (France), Frank Perrin (France), Simon Procter (UK), et Ornela Vorpsi (Albanie), each have a highly personal take on the world of beauty, of making fashion, investing themselves in it and making it vibrate to its very foundations. Their viewpoints, tender or critical, reveal a reality that we would be unable to perceive the whole of without it being exposed to us.

Conrad Bakker (1970), focuses, not without humor, on production. He offers a ‘remake’ of common consumer goods, books, records and magazines… A “true-false” copy of Artforum open to an advertisement for a luxury product questions the link between art, fashion and money. The object copied, reproduced, forged, confuses the visitor between the reality of an exhibition, by its nature temporary, and that of an artwork, an hommage asserted by the reality of our epoque.

Isabelle Chapuis (1978), winner of the 2010 Picto Prize for young fashion photography, is passionate about he work of artistic direction ahead of the same fashion. For her, fashion seems like a creative playground permitting every formal and narrative eccentricity to overcome preconceptions and create images of her very own. Her photographs were created with the creative complicity of Anja Kocovic.

Mat Collishaw (1966), a product of Goldsmith College at the time of the YBAs, has worked for twenty years on all the forms of what Baudelaire called “delightful horror” can take. “Des Fleurs Infectieuses aux Insecticides (Infectious Flowers with Insecticides)” (one of which is to be presented in FASHION IS ART), the now famous Last Meals on Death Row in Sordid Earth, his last major film production in collaboration with Ron Arad, the artist dresses the darkest realities in splendour, or to the contrary, diverts nature into that which is most beautiful, flowers, to show behind the scenes. “Beast in Me”- a title evocative of the reality hidden behind the idyll- shows us the sweet goddess Europe adorned with flowers and organza abducted by Zeus: a bull drunk with passion.

Éric Emo (1953), focuses on sensual texture by using fuzziness, valuing imperfection, doubt and intuition. When he adorns his characters with masks, when he hides their bodies, he asserts the importance of suggestion. “The silhouette, as Florence Müller says in Londerzeel, is what one retains from a person who passes in the street, it is a apparition, the imprint of the person…”

Mounir Fatmi (1970), who casts a keen eye on the parallel worlds he frequents, whose work is censored in Dubai, criticized by his peers when he exhibits in Jerusalem, praised in the United States, analyzed in Europe, is especially interested in the subliminal messages of the images which surround us, images which we create, recreate and re-evaluate constantly. Mounir Fatmi proposes three works for Art is Fashion, works which juxtapose the first and last pages of today’s magazines, from the Nouvel Observateur to Connaissance des Arts, thus highlighting the associations of images that, as real and obvious as they are, would have completely escaped us were it not for the work of the artist.

Marie Hendricks (1981) proposes an original installation, once again creating, as she did recently at Maison Rouge or Pearls of the North in Paris, a multi-formed and vibrant world inspired, among other things, by her childhood in the Netherlands. Equally inspired by artistic movements involving artifice, such as Mannerism, Baroque and Rococo, it carries us spectators into a world of dreams that uniquely marries the enigmatic and the everyday. In this dream world, a costume is essential: A mask which, as always, is revealing.

Jean-Michel Pancin (1971) is passionate about parallel worlds. As an archaeologist in the prison of Avignon, he offers Art is Fashion socks from the penitentiary. Socks unlike any others because they contain messages, money and drugs… rolled into tiny pellets and thrown to the prisoners in the yard by their wives. Often snagged in the nets of barbed wire circling the yard, do they become fashion? The question of prison as a place of creation is raised. Shown in the gallery’s bathroom, in a “medicine cabinet,” Pancin’s socks speak also of the relationship with the body, an eminently parodoxical relationship, between imprisonment and liberty.

Frank Perrin (1968), creator of Bloc-Notes and Crash magazines, photographer of post-capitalism, collective fantasies and contemporary obsessions, presents two new propositions created for Art is Fashion. One, Ghosts, places a mirror, in a dialogue out of time between the beauties of the Quattrocento and today’s icons, as if the first ones had modeled the seconds. The other, Empire, offers an ultimate vision of Muammar G in fashionista: An incongruous adieu that questions the strange entanglement of fashion and politics. According to Perrin, “As the skin is the body- fashion is the skin of the times.”

Simon Procter (1959), between Paris and New York, between Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, between top models and Hollywood stars, between photography and classical painting, between research and lifestyle, offers a baroque synthesis off fashions and the complex worlds in which he operates. His photos show his talent as a painter and colorist, like a fantastic director of a reality rich with different lives lived.

Ornela Vorpsi (1968) recreates Woman: Nothing Obvious (a book of photographs published in 2001 by Scalo). For Art is Fashion, this many-faceted artist (she is one of the thirty-five most-recognized novelists in Europe) offers a series of original drawings which once again tell of Woman and her beauty. The drawing, the line: The basis and foundation of all artistic representation, but also of fashion. Ornela VORPSI presents her work in the gallery’s boudoir, a location befitting her intimate manner of drawing, photographing, and mixing genres. Ornela Vorpsi and Mat Collishaw also created the art book Vetri Rosa (Take 5 Editions) together, also available at the Taïss Gallery.

  • Opening Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 7 PM
  • Art is fashion event Meeting Friday, December 9, 2011 at 6 PM

    For the occasion of Londerzeel’s presentation, a conversation between Florence MÜLLER and Barbara Polla on the display of fashion in museums.

  • Art is fashion event Meeting Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 6:30 PM

    Pascal Gautrand in conversation : Art is Language, Fashion is Language, Art is Fashion

Taïss Gallery Gallery
Map Map
03 Le Marais Zoom in 03 Le Marais Zoom out

14, rue Debelleyme

75003 Paris

T. 01 42 76 91 57 — F. 01 42 76 91 57

www.taissgalerie.com

Filles du Calvaire
Saint-Sébastien – Froissart

Opening hours

Tuesday – Saturday, 11 AM – 7 PM
Other times by appointment

The artists

  • Mounir Fatmi
  • Mat Collishaw
  • Marie Hendriks
  • Eric Emo
  • Conrad Bakker
  • Isabelle Chapuis
  • Ornela Vorpsi
  • Simon Procter
  • Frank Perrin
  • Jean-Michel Pancin

From the same artists