DressSpace

Jacob Hashimoto is a poet of the air, an artist playing a game or perhaps dancing, with the light, with the atmosphere and with the wind.

His light and flying installations, from their very structure (made of paper and bamboo) which trace that of kites, are a party for the eyes, an unexpected snowfall, an dreamy emotion for our senses.

Each one of his works, those created to be hung on walls as well as the environmental ones, is made of an random number of paper rings made one by one, at times painted with geometric patterns but more often left white, then hung  together in the undulated weave of hundreds of nylon threads.

This extraordinary, young American artist seems to hold on to a tight connection with the Japanese aesthetics of his family origins, but in recent years has cultivated a privileged relationship with Italy as well, setting up a studio in Verona.

Further, from June 1^st through August it will be possible to visit his installation entitled “Silence Still Governs Our Consciousness” at the MACRO – Rome’s museum of contemporary art.

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The Prinzhorn collection is today a very beautiful and unique German museum in the city of Heidelberg, which voluntarily contributes its works to travelling exhibitions world-wide.  It owes itself to the psychiatrist and art-lover Hans Prinzhorn, who, in the early 1900s constituted a pioneering collection of so-called “irregular” art, produced by patients who were hospitalised for mental illnesses.

But he didn’t stop at plumbing the depths of Germany and with the collaboration of foreign colleagues, was able to recover hundreds of works even in European hospitals.

The wealth of themes, inventions, original techniques of those authors, who often use of reclaimed materials or those of the hospital, is surprising and displays no signs of being inferior to official artistic panorama.

One in particular is the amazing and mysterious jacket by a woman named Agnes Richter, dating back to the end of the 1800s it is made of the grey cloth from a mental institution patient’s uniform.  This splendid artefact which was used also as a source of inspiration for theatrical performances in Germany, has the unique and fascinating characteristic of being a sewn diary, an autobiographical testimony of a mentally ill person who transcribed her feelings and fears with needle and thread into a thick constellation of lines and characters which cover the garment’s entire surface.

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An absolute genius of the contemporaneous art, a poet of images …

He is the Korean artist Do Ho Suh born in Seoul in 1962, but moved since he was young to the United States where he finished his artistic studies and where he lives today.

The sign of an extraordinary Oriental elegance and refinement pervades every single work, also the ones having a more strict political and critical content against the masse society or the military organizations.

But we can only be enchanted in front of his aerial installations and read where the shell of a body is supported by a parachute of clothe, or by the silk and nylon structures reproducing with a transparent and flying material actual living structures, rebuilt through his remembrances.

The work “Reflection” is wonderful, where an oriental arc is spectacularly reproduced above and below the plane of a translucent surface representing water.

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He is known as Christo and indeed the Bulgarian artist universally known for his clamorous and spectacular “parcel wrappings” has renounced to his surname Javacheff to sign only with his first name, a very respectful name.

Born in 1935, he leaves his mother land still under the Iron Curtain to move during the 50’s to Paris, where he meets his wife Jeanne Claude, with who he will have a constant artistic association, continued until his recent death.

At the beginning he rediscovers, with fabrics and string, everyday small objects, then furniture, up to intervene on real architectonic or even environmental structures, such as cliffs and islands.

His poetics has been described with the concept of “revealing by withholding”, therefore  making evident, unavoidable and manifest what is hidden, veiled, disguised. The parcel wrapping is almost an underline that instead of erasing the memory and the vision suggests to remember and gives a greater importance to things.

During the years his pharaonic parcel wrappings have involved among the others buildings and monuments: the Pont Neuf in Paris, the Reichstag in Berlin, seat of the parliament of the unified Germany and also some islands of Florida surrounded at their base by 603850 square meters of pink polypropylene.

Christo’s installations are of course temporary and despite the huge investment required, they are wholly financed by the sale of his designs and architectonic projects.

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A very lively and explosive fashion parade Agatha Ruiz de la Prada is an event confining with the theatre or with the circus’ fable aspects and it is like that also when her inspiration comes from a great and cheered artist as René Magritte.

In the wise and a bit crazy hands of the Spanish fashion designer, also the surreal and scary themes of the Belgian painter are full of irony and play and every psychoanalytic characteristic of Magritte’s oneiric subjects is left apart for being substituted by the fun and playful hyperbole.

In the autumn-winter 2010 collection among the colourful sculpture-like-dresses of Agatha we can find punctual citations but never obvious together with titles of many paintings of this maestro of the surrealism, in love with the optical illusion of the  estrangement.

It is the case of the busts made with cages or bricks, or of the enlarged details of the body, or again the exchange between what is inside and outside, with dresses that instead of containing her they become flesh.

All this lived through the joyful and optimistic filter of the pink glasses of a magic-stylist that will continue to make people talk about her.

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He is known as Christo and indeed the Bulgarian artist universally known for his clamorous and spectacular “parcel wrappings” has renounced to his surname Javacheff to sign only with his first name, a very respectful name.

Born in 1935, he leaves his mother land still under the Iron Curtain to move during the 50’s to Paris, where he meets his wife Jeanne Claude, with who he will have a constant artistic association, continued until his recent death.

At the beginning he rediscovers, with fabrics and string, everyday small objects, then furniture, up to intervene on real architectonic or even environmental structures, such as cliffs and islands.

His poetics has been described with the concept of “revealing by withholding”, therefore  making evident, unavoidable and manifest what is hidden, veiled, disguised. The parcel wrapping is almost an underline that instead of erasing the memory and the vision suggests to remember and gives a greater importance to things.

During the years his pharaonic parcel wrappings have involved among the others buildings and monuments: the Pont Neuf in Paris, the Reichstag in Berlin, seat of the parliament of the unified Germany and also some islands of Florida surrounded at their base by 603850 square meters of pink polypropylene.

Christo’s installations are of course temporary and despite the huge investment required, they are wholly financed by the sale of his designs and architectonic projects.

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Sandra Tomboloni the childhood’s colours brought into the adults’ world

When the childhood decides to live also in adults, it gives origin to wonderful worlds, made with fabulous colours and objects melted with magic.

Who has ever tried to use plasticine for modeling animals or flower shapes, small and shacking buildings?

It is actually from the plasticine that the extraordinary sculptures of a Tuscan artist,  Sandra Tomboloni, take shape, who has chosen this merely childish and playful material as her artistic instrument.

So all the objects and the environments created by Sandra Tomboloni are covered by an encouraging and soft skin, a magic consistency, which remembers Hansel and Gretel’s  little marzipan house.

Plasticine dresses, where a field of colourful small frogs blossoms, together with cots and sugary baby-beds that are like inviting you to bite and squeeze them in your fingers like babies’ little plastic things they use in their teething period.

It is as if the fantasy and cartoon world enter into the real life, substituting it, changing the characteristics and consistency of those things surrounding us and that we use in our life, taking us suddenly back to the dream dimension.

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Jan Fabre, horror dresses

When dresses express the hallucinations of a soul

There are artists that follow one only idea all their life long, an obsession, a discipline, but Jan Fabre, Belgium artist (1958) among the most popular at international level, seems to overcome every frontier, firmly switching from theatre to the direction, from writing to art.

Jan Fabre seems to mix two different points of view from his vision of things, an alchemy of analytical science and dream imagination.

Jan Fabre prefers much more combining the cruel provocation of the material constituting the dress to, for example, the dress encouraging and familiar shape.

The harmonic and captivating appearance of these works reveal its true nature to a close glance, it is constituted by cut bones or by a weaving of coleopters, completely covering the metallic structure of the clothes.

Jan Fabre’s passion for the insects, with which he has realized several works, up to covering an entire vault of a castle, should come from his great-grandfather, one of the most famous entomologist of his period.

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When the art works on the human body

Rebecca Horn, elegant and free artist, born in Germany in 1944, who became popular in the artistic scene already at the end of the Sixties, at the beginning of the conceptual art, in a period where the scenery was strongly populated by men.

Since the beginning Rebecca Horn has focused her creative interest in the body, in its internal mechanisms and in its movements too, creating a close contact with the audience, who was asked to interact during the performance and in the installations, mainly of theatrical impact, that involved her directly.

A wider reflection on the body led her to think about the concept of dress, not as simple cover or ornament, but as structure able to change or accentuate the sensorial capabilities, extending our limbs and structure.

Rebecca Horn creates then spectacular feathers shells, pointed cones to wear as unicorns on the head and to tie up with ribbons along the whole body, or masks and muzzles with fixed pens, so that it is possible to draw with the movements of the head, instead of using the arm.

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Virtual Shoe Museum

It is a virtual museum, an on-line gallery, a collection of unique pieces a bit crazy, anyway this time we are not talking about paintings but shoes.

It is indeed called the “Virtual shoe museum” and it has been created in 2004 by Liza Snook who has started to collect and catalogue the images of the most sensational and amazing shoes, not only of the most famous designers but also of contemporaneous artists that have tried at this activity, which has increased in the years thanks to the support of careful collaborators.

There are importable shoes and wonders of fashion, wheeled sandals and flippers with heels and again duck slippers, an actual funfair for the eyes, dedicated to all the lovers of this cult object that is the shoe, that has always represented a real attraction for all women of all kinds.

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