The new exhibition on Virgil Abloh, opens July 1 at the Brooklyn Museum curated by Antwaun Sargent. The artist himself participated in the design and layout of the exhibition, which was originally scheduled to open in 2020 but was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
the americanVirgil Abloh, designer and director of men's collections for Louis Vuitton, died earlier this year, aged 41, from cancer. The hip-hop fan started DJing in high school, studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin, but it was from 2000 onwards that his artistic career began to grow. Initially, he was an art consultant for Kanye West, advising the “rapper” on album covers and designing concert sets, among other things. In 2012, he created his first brand - Pyrex Vision and a year later, Off-White was born, a luxury streetwear brand that was bought in July by LVMH. He was the first major black designer, committed to affirming African American cultures, who achieved one of the most envied positions in the fashion and luxury sector in 2018, in the flagship label of LVMH, the number one luxury goods company in the world . The Brooklyn Museum show showcases Virgil Abloh's career as a conceptual artist and creative director for Louis Vuitton.
The title refers to Virgil Abloh's extensive use of quotation marks to transform the language within them into figures of speech. The curators organized the exhibition like a showroom and even included a merchandise store, “Church and State”. Featured in the exhibition is the white piece with wings, from the fall/winter 2022 show, the last Louis Vuitton collection that he supervised. The angelic leather ensemble, inspired by both urban streetwear and baroque fashion, captures audience attention with its skeletal lace wings, leather and grand scale. It does exactly what haute couture is supposed to do: overload the body and transform it into a sculptural work of art.
Virgil Abloh's multi-hyphenated practice has always embraced inclusivity, especially in traditionally closed institutions – such as the fashion world itself. This is emphasized in the sculpture Transparent DJM-900NXS2-P1 and Transparent CDJ-2000NXS2-P1 (2018), where CD players and speakers – which hark back to Abloh’s DJ background – play audio from Julia Roberts’ film “Pretty Woman”. , nineteen ninety.
With this exhibition the artist hoped that his work and the exhibition in general would inspire a new generation of artists, that it would be like an “invitation” for viewers to start drawing in notebooks or be creative in different ways. Virgil Abloh himself never stopped innovating or working in new ways, and his approach to exhibition building translates his ideas about fashion and design into a new medium.
