31 August 2008 – 23 November 2008

DRESSing the MESSAGE. Transformations of art and fashion

Cosima von Bonin, Daniele Buetti, Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Sylvie Fleury, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Grünfeld, Michel Majerus, Elke Marhöfer/Barbara Friess, Regina Maria Möller, Olaf Nicolai, Paulina Olowska, Karin Sander, Markus Schinwald, Silke Wagner, Johannes Wohnseifer, Erwin Wurm

Fashion is not just something to wear. It can be many different things: emotion, fantasy, protest, political statement, irritation, provocation etc. It is an expression authenticity, identity and social status. It operates as a means of recognition among the like-minded. And it conveys attitudes. Fashion is a dominant phenomenon that is taking up more and more space in daily life in all social strata, in all income and age groups. Fashion is an "identity good"; it serves as a means of creating and preserving one's personal identity and subjectivity; it generates social reality and has an immediate effect on the way we see ourselves. Clothing and/or fashion has meanwhile developed a semantic structure that is now one of the formal principles of communication in our modern society. Fashion touches, affects, moves, inspires and polarizes in much the same way as art. Thus the obvious question is: How do art and fashion relate to one another?

The starting points of the exhibition are the developments that have taken place since the 1990s. For the artist, fashion is a material. The artist develops specific strategies of appropriation and parasitic involvement and makes the phenomena, structures, functions and principles of fashion the subject matter of his or her art.

Artists also use clothing, fashion accessories and/or fabrics in order to make, with the means at their disposal, works of art in their own right. Here the artists' deliberately chosen materials carry overtones alluding in their respective works to the socio-cultural aspects of fashion, to the world of the consumer or to various subcultural tendencies. Also inherent in these overtones, by the same token, are allusions to economic and sociological conditions and circumstances.

Thus art reacts here to the allover aesthetic of a fashion chic that works like a modern party game where the players have to cross-dress between the fashionable and the artistic. While art certainly comes to terms with the world of fashion, it analyses it at the same time from a very critical distance.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with texts by Gabriele Sand, Raimar Stange, Schorsch Kamerun and Kristina Tieke. Price: 15 €.

The forthcoming exhibition forms part of the project "Hannover goes Fashion", which is sponsored by the European Union, the European Fund for Regional Development, the State of Lower Saxony, www.hannover.de, the Savings Bank Foundation of Lower Saxony, the Hanover Savings Bank, the Lotto Foundation of Lower Saxony and the Nord L/B (Norddeutsche Landesbank).

Address

Sprengel Museum Hannover
Kurt-Schwitters-Platz
30169 Hannover
phone +49 511 16 84 39 24
http://www.sprengel-museum.de

Opening Hours

Tuesday 10 a.m. - 8 p.m., Wednesday-Sunday 10 a.m. - 6 p.m., closed on Monday.

Description of the Museum

The collection includes works of the German expressionism, the French Cubism, the abstract art after the second world war and trends as minimal art and conceptional art. The area of Photography and media have become an important focus of the collection

Opened 1979, extension building 1992; architects: Peter and Ursula Trint, Dieter Quast

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