londonprintstudio’s current exhibition Grafik Apparel brings artists, designers and performers together to explore the messages and meanings encoded in the things we wear. 

It examines the interlocking strategies of artists and designers who stretch and invisibly mend the codes and clothes we ‘wear’.

Clothes entwine references, ironies and identities. Historically garments express a collective state of mind, status, allegiance, profession – and individual dreams. 70’s punk expressed disillusionment with authority. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, couturier Schiaparelli worked with leading artists and designed clothes that referenced surrealism, while artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven challenged respectable society as ‘the only one living anywhere who dresses Dada, loves Dada, lives Dada’.

 

 

From the 1980’s, many fashion designers have wanted to be recognised as artists, producing ‘conceptual clothes’. Using strategies associated with contemporary art they have created clothes that are sometimes better suited to exhibitions than for everyday wear.

However, artists have often designed clothes - from Klimt to Matisse, Salvador Dalí, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Oscar Schlemmer. Sonia Delaunay and Natalia Goncharova were particularly interested in clothes and textile design, producing many designs for popular consumption.

 

 

Grafik Apparel will channel the spirit of the Baroness, through artists who blur the lines between fashion and art, into a memorable exhibition.

This exhibition will explore the creative tension between the separate worlds of art and fashion, and includes the following artists:

Philip Colbert, Godfried Donkor, Janieta Eyre, Dana Haim & Laerke Hooge Andersen, Andrew Ibi, Pia Interlandi, Sabina Keric & Yvonne Bayer, Naiza Khan, Anders Krisar, Kirstie Macleod, Ruth Marten, Rhian Solomon & Paul Rider, Jo Spence, Stella Whalley, Kimiko Yoshida, The Countess Alex Zapak.

 

See related listing Grafik Apparel Interweaving Art and Fashion