Surreal Gifts for Unreal Times
… is the title of an article in this months’ edition of the T Magazine of the New York Times. I am proud and honored to have a few pieces of my Dressing collection presented there.
The whole article could be found here : www.nytimes.com/2017/11/27/t-magazine/surreal-gifts.html
A guide of artful objects that pay homage to fleeting or quotidian forms.
Chapter 4: In the Boudoir
In December 1961, the artist Claes Oldenburg displayed a series of brashly quotidian sculpted objects in “The Store,” his crowded exhibit on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Perhaps the most pointed was “Braselette,” a plaster bra messily painted with shiny enamel. The ultimate “rips out of reality,” Oldenburg said, were those that used a hard material to transform a quintessentially soft piece. Rendering pliable objects rigid has since become a way for artists to play with the paradoxical relationship between flexibility and strength — from the hauntingly empty bronze garments by the sculptor Judith Shea, to Alexander McQueen’s 2001 gown of cascading razor clam shells, to the handbag and lingerie seen here, made by the jeweler Violaine Ulmer from porcelain in Toulouse, France. Ironically, after the stiff statements of “The Store,” Oldenburg changed course, depicting mundane objects like a B.L.T. and an ice cream cone in pillowy materials. Traversing the road back to softness helped the artist once again see the light.