Martin Margiela in Berlin

Retired from the fashion world in 2008, Martin Margiela, the artist behind Maison Margiela, the recognised fashion brand founded in 1988 and one of the most experimental brands of the last decades, transitioned into the art world. But he did so without simply taking what he had created in his fashion career and translating it into art. He didn't need to invent a completely new world.

In this new exhibition, we can see how he is reinventing what we consider familiar and giving it a bit of uncertainty; a domestic object can become sculptural; something designed for the body can suddenly tell us more about the body by being taken away from it.

This exhibition moves between these different states, revealing an artist who has continued to develop the same curiosity across different materials and mediums, in coherence with his personal style and past. Painting, sculpture and found objects coexist without the need for one medium to dominate the others. What connects them is less a particular technique than a particular way of looking.

There is also a distinct physicality to the work. Margiela’s interest in the human body is never purely figurative. It extends to the spaces the body inhabits and the objects it encounters every day: where we sit, what we wear, what we touch, what we read, what surrounds us. The exhibition brings these relationships together in ways that can be unsettling and unexpectedly intimate.

In this exhibition, we can see paintings with a sort of carpet-like feel, his iconic white paintings, pink oil paintings on canvas, broken bathroom mosaics with circles in black paint, underwear reinterpreted, garment patterns, reshaped hangers, cinema seats in white…

There is not so much that can be explained about the work without taking away from the experience of seeing it in person.

The rest is better discovered at the gallery.