stage name nome d’arte Submerged by magma of that liquid society predicted by Zygmunt Bauman at the dawn of millennium, how much earth is still occupied by the concept of 'boundary'? Which are the boundaries of the earth, in light of the sacred and raped human mobility, and which are those of art, if 'plastic' increasingly becomes 'liquid'? We need a reflection able to trigger the sanctity of doubt that art, like the earth, knows how to embrace what overflows from threadbare definitions; and while a liquid society with little awareness of its history does not seem to be able to deal with its humanity, art is more and more consciously dealing with its interstices, recalibrating on those spaces in between, once defined 'boundaries'. Their tenuous edges, those gray border areas, are dynamic places of production of works considered illegitimate by the system, not worthy of the ‘artwork’ title, according to those tireless ones who still trace tired borders. But – as often happens, when nowadays someone speaks of legitimacy – the most powerful works are those triggering large circuits of meaning and connection, enhancing their strength thanks to their congenital inability of labelling, elevating their rank to experience of total narration. Sublime, in its original meaning: sub-limen, there, on the border. Creations realised by Iris van Herpen [Wamel, 1984, lives and works in Amsterdam], compendiums of high tailoring, contemporary art and avant-garde technology, stand as pure Gesamtkunstwerk: total artworks. Born and raised in a village of less than 2,000 inhabitants on the river Möhne, her studio in Amsterdam, founded in 2007 after graduation and two apprenticeships – one by visual artist Claudy Jongstra, one alongside the genius of Alexander Mc�ueen – watch to the IJ lake. Water, in constant transformation, is her element. And if rivers and lakes are often used to impose bounds by default, only luminous minds are able to subvert their vision in bridges, in ports, in energy conductors, in contact. In fertile fusion, not in sterile separation. From the water emerges her first multidisciplinary creative project, declined in 2010 in the Crystallization collection, in collaboration with Benthem Crouwel Architekten, signing the expansion of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. An architecture called Bathtub, which van Herpen translated into dress hot-shaping by hand the polyethylene terephthalate, refined trompe-l-œil of a crystalline plunge. An elegant shock-wave that immediately transported her to the stable calendar of Paris Haute Couture since 2011 – year of presentation of her Escapism collection in which, first in the history of fashion, she realised entirely printed in 3D tailored creations – and in as many interdisciplinary collaborations [again in architecture with Daniel Widrig, Neri Oxman and, permanently, with Philip Beesley, with whom she started a fruitful dialogue with CERN - Conseil Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire; in music, repeatedly, with Björk; in cinema, among others, with Luc Besson and Tilda Swinton; in art with Marina Abramović, Lawrence Malstaf, Nick Knight, and in dance, with Nanine Linning, Benjamin Millepied, Sasha Waltz, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui]. Dance, essential component of van Herpen’s imaginative journey, to the extent that each of her creations is dynamic towards the body by her vivified. Teenager, Iris van Herpen studied for a long time ballet, along with violin and painting; young woman, weaned at sartorial Id. no. NAME, SURNAME, OVERVIEW. beauty by a grandmother collector of vintage clothes, she graduated in fashion design at ArtEZ, in Arnhem: «I realized that through fashion I would have been able to paint and sculpt too, and that would have represented the ideal way to concentrate myself on the body». Body as a canvas, or as a material to be molded; body as an artwork that dances, that sustains, that lives on a cross-border vision, through a dress which is no longer a rigid perimeter but a third dimension, which does not fall back to evaluative canons of fashion, but to those of artistic avant-garde. Proof is that – in addition to 17 prestigious awards not only in haute couture, but also and above in intellectual abilities [among them, the Time magazine Best Inventions, 2011; her inclusion in the Wired Smart List, 2013; Apple’s mention, in 2014, between millennium’s innovators] as in contemporary art [one in all, the Johannes Vermeer Prijs in 2017] – further and definitive demonstration of a total absence of boundaries in her vision is the very collocation of her creations, not only kept in luxurious walk-in closets, but principally in striking museum collections, with curators the likes of Hans Ulrich Obrist and Zaha Hadid [Maison Mais Non, London, 2016] and Harold Koda, MET’s Costume Institute director from 2000 to 2015, which defines her as «a conceptual artist, and her medium is the dress». To date, her creations have been exposed in 79 group exhibitions in international art temples such as, among others, the Victoria & Albert Museum [2015] and the Barbican Art Gallery [2016] in London; the MoMA - Museum of Modern Art [2015] and the MET - Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art [2016] in New York; the Palais de Tokyo [2015], the Center Pompidou [2013] and the David Lynch’s Silencio Club [2013] in Paris; The Bass Art Museum in Miami [2014], the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam [2012, 2013, 2014], the Venaria Reale in Turin [2017], the Belvedere Museum in Vienna [2017], the BOZAR Center for Fine Arts in Brussels [2016, 2017], the Centraal Museum in Utrecht [2010], the Groninger Museum in Groningen [2011]. It is right from the latter, in collaboration with the High Museum of Art in Atlanta where it staged in 2015, that irradiates Iris van Herpen: Transforming Fashion, itinerant anthological exhibition that, after Europe, is now circulating within North America and Canada museum institutions – ideal habitats to intimately perceive the designer's height, infinitely more than from the front-row of a catwalk. A retrospective as a diachronic path of her aesthetic and compositional career framing, in a measured and dynamic curatorial rendering, 45 selected creations from 15 collections designed between 2008 and 2015. A fashion-beyond trip made by cyber materials, 3D prints and cytosine embroidery, cymatics and biomorphism, maddened sartorial filaments and engineering serial components, sculptural practices, plastic twists. A techno-experimentation taking root on prosthetic shapes and volumes, on cybernetic warps, on living movements of her creations. Like in the best dystopian literature’s novels, like the most harmonic electro-sounds, Iris van Herpen blows off not only the interdisciplinary, but also the spatio-temporal boundaries. Hyper-contemporaneous Nordic Sibyl, Iris van Herpen turns our liquid future into sophisticated present. www.irisvanherpen.com Iris van Herpen, Biopiracy, autumn/winter 2014/2015 3D printed thermoplastic polyurethane 92A-1 with silicone coating credits: Bart Oomes, no.6 Studio - courtesy: Phoenix Art Museum 50 51
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