Wolfgang Joop is not just a fashion designer – an exhibition on his life’s work shows the many talents of the artist from Saturday in Potsdam. His collections on catwalks in Paris or Milan can be seen on meter -high video projections. But more than 200 pictures and sculptures that show angels and monkeys as recurring motifs are also hanging in the gallery.
Review of Joop’s work, which turns 81 in November, can be seen free to enter Potsdam from October 4 to November 18.
Also an emotional balance for Joop
What does the Lebenswerk exhibition mean to him? “It is of course a bit of ambivalent. I look and say: You have been. I don’t see any future now, but only a past that touches me. Because with every picture and every collection and every photo I can think of all the time,” said Joop of the German press agency a few days before the show opened. The stage fright is great.
Modern art and fashion combined
The maker of the exhibition is his life partner Edwin Lemberg. It is brave and new to mix art with fashion like this, he said. Joop is one of the most successful German fashion designers with Karl Lagerfeld, who died in 2019. He worked with top models like Nadja Auermann and Claudia Schiffer.
Long before he started painting: for example, he grabbed Flemish still lifes in oil and baroque putting – works that can be seen in the exhibition. “I would feel locked up if I were just a fashion designer or just a sculpture or draftsman,” said Joop at RBB-Inforadio and described himself as a “modest eccentric”.
Will exhibition also be seen in other places?
The team Joop said that the interest in the retrospective, which can be seen for around six weeks in Potsdam for around six weeks. It is conceivable to show the show in other cities, said Lemberg, without calling more precise plans. The exhibition “Wolfgang Joop in the Kuntraum” is also said to be a gift to Joop’s home Potsdam, where he was born.
After stations, for example in Hamburg and New York, he lives again near Park Sanssouci. “A lot of what I have created also has something of this city,” said Joop, according to a message from the city at the start of the exhibition on Saturday.
Joop’s life’s work should actually be shown in Potsdam for his 80th birthday last year. However, the exhibition has been postponed several times. In the Potsdam art space, the show extends over 450 square meters and six subject areas.