Fashion and art as a mirror of social changes and individual needs are the focus of an exhibition in the Berlinische Galerie. The museum shows «Fashion Pictures Art Clothes. Photography, painting and fashion from 1900 to today” from Friday to May 30th. To this end, the team around curator Annelie Lütgens has brought together around 270 works and groups of works with fashion photographs, paintings and drawings.
Shown will be “no ride through the fashion revolutions of the 20th century,” emphasized Lütgens on Thursday. Rather, it is an art-historical exhibition with a “dialogue between pictures and clothes”. For the models presented, the museum primarily used items on loan from other museums. According to director Thomas Köhler, around 80 percent of the works in the exhibition come from the company’s own collection.
The corset marks the start of the exhibition. The constricting effects are shown using models and paintings and placed in relation to reform movements that propagated a turn towards the natural forms of the body. Similar relationships are established, for example, for the 1920s with works by Jeanne Mammen or the Dada movement and avant-garde clothing designs. The works from the post-war period stand for new beginnings, East Berlin in the 1980s for an artistic Bohème, for example with the works of the photographer Sibylle Bergemann.
In addition to paintings, drawings and photographs by Lotte Laserstein, Hannah Höch, George Grosz and Helmut Newton, among others, the exhibition also focuses on works by contemporary artists, some of which were created for the presentation. (dpa)