Bass Museum of Art announces Vanitas: Fashion and Art

Bass Museum of Art presents Vanitas: Fashion and Art on view March 13–June 20, 2014.

Vanitas: Fashion and Art examines the theme of vanitas as expressed by avant garde ready-to-wear and haute couture fashion, and contemporary artworks. Traditionally used to refer to a type of still life painting popular in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century, the term ‘vanitas’ has become more generally associated with art that meditates on the ephemeral character of earthly pleasures and worldly accomplishments, and highlights the fragility of our desires in the face of the inevitability of death. With its accelerated cycle of obsolescence, explicit manifestation of status and material success, and potential for narcissistic self-regard, fashion is a particularly apt medium through which to explore this exhibition’s central theme.

Vanitas artworks usually incorporate particular types of imagery that allude to the transience of life, as well as often including more explicit representations of momento mori. In order to draw out these connections, the exhibition’s curator Harold Koda has subdivided the exhibition into sections according to the allegorical imagery often found in vanitas works, such as skulls, butterflies and poppies. Works featuring these themes include Jason Salavon’s Still Life (Vanitas) which presents a photo-realistic rendering of a candlestick and mammal skull, with the latter imperceptibly ‘evolving’ to represent a range of different animals; Mat Collishaw’s Insecticide photograph of crushed winged insects; and a poppy hat by Jasper Conran and Philip Treacy.

Pieces by Isaac Mizrahi, Elsa Schiaparelli and Alexander McQueen will also be on display, alongside dresses by Yohji Yamamoto and Iris van Herpen, among others. These pieces from the world of fashion will be juxtaposed with film and video works by Sam Taylor-Johnson and Greta Alfaro; photographs from Pinar Yolacan’s “Perishables” series; and Ori Gersht’s Blow Up, a large scale photograph of an elaborate floral arrangement captured at the moment that it explodes, based on a nineteenth-century still life by the French painter Henri Fantin-Latour.

The exhibition is curated by Harold Koda, an award-winning curator and scholar, who has been Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 2000. He has published widely and his recent exhibitions include The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion (2009), Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations (2012) and the upcoming Charles James: Beyond Fashion (May 2014).

Bass Museum of Art
2100 Collins Avenue
Miami Beach, FL 33139