The "Myth of Fashion" exhibition by an eminent Montenegrin artist Dimitrija Popović, will be opened tomorrow in Zagreb, Croatia, in the Meštrović Pavilion of the Croatian Society of Fine Artists, where it will be available until February 26.
At the opening of the exhibition, as the audience is used to when it comes to this multimedia artist, two performances will be performed, namely the "I am, who I am" art model Josip Joško Tešija and "Fashion cage" of fashion designers Branke Vučetić Atletić, both inspired by the works that make up the installation.
The cycle of works entitled "The Myth of Fashion" deals with the concept of fashion as one of the most significant phenomena of the contemporary "spectacle society", said the author. The exhibition consists of forty works - paintings, drawings, objects and installations that were created in the last four years, during which Popović explored the topic of fashion and the challenges arising from the contemporary fashion industry.
"In the spectacles of supreme aestheticization and eroticization, the female body appears in a double function - it shows the garment and is shown. From the first biblical woman, from the shame due to the realization of nudity and the fig leaf that hides the shameful place of her nakedness, from Eve, to the contemporary modeling star - the phenomenon of clothing is mythologized. The main characteristics of this myth of hiding bodily nudity (although it is hidden in order to stand out) are the inventiveness of shaping, designing clothes that no longer have an exclusive utilitarian purpose. Thus, in contemporary fashion, the body becomes a fashion body, an event in itself that appears in its new identity as a transformed body of a hyperidealized and designed new reality," explained Popović.
He adds that the new reality conditions the rigor of procedures in order to achieve the desired goal.
“The body undergoes a regimen to become the new fashion body. It is corrected by the use of lifting, silicone, botox, fillers, so that its new appearance ideally corresponds with what shows it, giving it the appearance of a living sculpture. The body becomes a performative form of the fashion corpus", added Popović, who, through this cycle of works, speaks in a symbolic way about the myth of contemporary fashion.
The text for the accompanying catalog of the exhibition was written by prof. fashion design and aesthetics Petra Krpan who emphasized that Popović opens up new questions about fashion, the body and materiality through his interdisciplinary works.
"The focus is on the female fashion body as a fluid and metamorphic entity that is constantly changing. Performance art also has its place at the opening of the exhibition, where two performances inspired by the works of the 'Myth of Fashion' cycle will be performed... The perfect shading, characteristic of Dimitri Popović's work, emphasizes the volume, while by using different colors: red and blue, the author plays emotions of the viewer. The body, often interlaced with lines and full fills of color, acts in motion, in an event. So Popović experiments with the understanding of the body as a picture in motion," she wrote, among other things.
The organizer of the exhibition is the Mimar Museum, and after Zagreb, the "Myth of Fashion" exhibition will be presented in the city of fashion - Milan, at the beginning of June this year.
Bonus video:
