The MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main stages the first comprehensive museum exhibition of the work of Kostas Murkudis, one of the most well-known fashion designers in the world today. He lives and works in Berlin these days. The exhibition project is again one on the borderlands between the art and fashion.

Kostas Murkudis

Visual art, architecture and artists have had an immense influence on Murkudis’s work. This circumstance is manifest particularly in his sculptural approach, his investigation of three-dimensional materials, his creative praxis, but also in the presentation of his designs in a manner distinctly different from the ordinary fashion show.

Over the past twenty years he has collaborated with many international labels, and he is one of the few German designers gained international fame and recognition. In the position of creative director he has developed fashion lines and looks for companies such as Balenciaga, New York Industrie, Pringle of Scotland, Closed, or, most recently, Ter et Bantine. Beginning in 1986, Murkudis worked closely with the designer Helmut Lang for seven years before founding his own label KOSTAS MURKUDIS in 1994.

In 2013, Murkudis donated large parts of his archive as well as original designs and prototypes to three international museum collections: the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, the Palais Galliera – Musée de la mode de la ville de Paris, and the Kyoto Costume Institute, Japan. His gift to the MMK is the basis of the exhibition in Frankfurt.

The exhibition

In the exhibition designed by the artist Carsten Nicolai and the architect Aaron Werbick, Murkudis’s creations enter into dialogue with the MMK collection. It’s an awesome opportunity to explore today’s relation between art and fashion and an interesting approach. The exhibition showcases Murkudis’s work in selected collections, workgroups and prototypes. The exchange with art, an aspect Murkudis describes as central to his life and work, is made
visible in this exhibition. You will find important works by John Chamberlain, Jack Goldstein, Steven Parrino, Yves Klein, Juergen Teller, Blinky Palermo, Sigmar Polke and Franz Erhard Walther. The relation to art is very important for Murkudis fashion. A lot of his pieces are unique and not designed as Ready-to-Wear fashion.

The exhibition consists of altogether fourteen sections, each of which is devoted to a different aspect of the designer’s work. In addition to articles of clothing from Murkudis’s collections of the last six years, backstage photos of fashion shows, film and sound installations and insights into his archive and idea-generation process.

#exhibition | At Close Range

#museum | MMK2, Frankfurt a. M.

#until | 14 February 2016

All exhibition views by Axel Schneider | (c) MMK2 Frankfurt