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At Close
Range
Kostas
Murkudis
and the
MMK Collection
17.7. 2015
— 14.2.2016
ition
Exhibe
d
i
Gu
“Art has accompanied me all my life; it’s part of my life, part of
my curiosity.”
Kostas Murkudis
Kostas Murkudis (b. 1959 in Dresden) is a crosser of borders. On a
constant search for new challenges and ideas, he roams between
fashion and the visual arts. His presentation forms undermine the
conventions of the fashion world and his designs address performative, sculptural and conceptual issues; together, they change
our accustomed conception of fashion.
Kostas Murkudis is among the most influential designers in
Germany. His œuvre occupies a realm between free artistic endeavour and commercial work for the fashion industry. In the
position of creative director he has developed fashion lines and
looks for companies such as New York Industrie, Pringle of Scotland, Closed, or, most recently, Ter et Bantine. In 1994 he founded
his own label—KOSTAS MURKUDIS—and over the years he has
frequently cooperated with artists in the creation of his designs.
With his “laboratory collections”, Murkudis has been experimenting with fashion independently of the industry’s marketing and
production conditions since 2009.
In 2013, Murkudis donated three complete fashion lines of the
past years to the MMK. Parts of these collections are here being
presented in combination with earlier and more recent ones
as well as individual Murkudis creations in an exhibition designed
by the artist Carsten Nicolai and the architect Aaron Werbick.
For the presentation at the MMK 2, Murkudis has moreover selected numerous works from the museum’s holdings which he is
staging in dialogue with his own designs and works. The exchange with art, an aspect Murkudis describes as central to his
life and work, is here made comprehensively visible for the
first time.
Exhibition Map
8
9
11
10
7
13
12
14
6
1
Entrance
MMK 2
Media Room
3
2
5
4
1
1
Panel Dresses
“At the beginning is always the material. The first information
that I get when I touch the fabric.”
Kostas Murkudis experiment in his studio, which he conceives of
as a laboratory and “alchemic kitchen”, with a wide range of materials and processing techniques to arrive at his formal inventions
and surface textures. Within this context, he frequently hybridizes traditional and unusual fabrics and industrial technologies.
The series of Panel Dresses, realized by Murkudis in the autumn
of 2014 as an independent project, is an example of this approach. For the dresses, each of which consists of several modules, he combines various silks with lurex fabrics and neoprene.
In many cases, the surfaces of the materials have undergone
special treatment: have been covered with graphic laser patterns,
roughened, or coated with a wet-looking, rubber-like layer of
silicon. Finally, the dresses’ horizontally segmented modules
have been assembled in individual sections and the seams
trimmed in part with fringes. Sculptural strategies for the creation
of castings and the treatment of surfaces served Murkudis
here as sources of inspiration.
For the exhibition, the Panel Dresses were filmically staged by
the Haw-Lin Services studio. The film brings the elements of
movement and floating forms—central aspects of Murkudis’s
œuvre.
“I need that moment of exchange, that sense that there’s a human being there, who is perhaps sub-consciously expressing
whether he or she feels good or not. During the fittings, the models walk around and move. I try to imagine what it feels like to
wear what they’re wearing.”
2
Steven Parrino (1958 in New York, US – 2005 in New York, US)
The work Bunny Glamazon vehemently resists the traditional twodimensionality of painting. Steven Parrino began by coating the
canvas with a monochrome layer of shiny silver lacquer; then he
gathered up the fabric in such a way as to form complex folds. It
no longer serves as a flat support for a depiction but appears in its
textile structure as a three-dimensional object.
Parrino’s œuvre betrays the influence of his fascination with the
anarchic sentiments of the biker culture and punk rock. Through
their narrative titles as well as their art-historical references and
conceptual reflections on painting, his works consistently contain
allusions to sub-cultural phenomena. The painting’s silver surface, for example, triggers associations with Andy Warhol’s Silver
Clouds as well as with the reflective chrome surfaces of motorcycle rims. The title Bunny Glamazon, for its part, is the stage name
of a vinyl-and-leather-clad domina from the wrestling scene.
2 The 1998 spring/summer collection
In 1996—i.e. after founding his own label, KOSTAS MURKUDIS—
the designer began presenting his fashion lines regularly in Paris,
Milan and New York. His third fashion show in Paris, for the
spring/summer 1998 season, is shown here from various perspectives.
On the first screen, the models are seen head-on on the cat-walk.
In the divided image of the second screen, this classical perspective is juxtaposed with a take of the audience—the focus here
is not only on the objects but also the subjects of the act of looking. The third screen offers a glimpse behind the scenes at the
backstage area and captures the tension-charged moment before
the models step into the spotlight.
One of the points of departure for this collection was Luis Buñuel’s
film Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972) which fascinates Murkudis with its portrayal of the influence of politics on
society and culture. The designer’s œuvre is strongly shaped by
film, whether Nouvelle Vague or Asian independent cinema.
3
Cinematic plots, atmospheres, set design and/or sound tracks
provide inspirations for his collections again and again.
Jack Goldstein (b. 1945 in Montreal, CA – 2003 in S. Bernardino,
US) Jack Goldstein is known as an exponent of the American
“Pictures Generation” that, in the 1970s and ’80s, explored the
world of the mass media, its social and psychological functions,
and its influence on individual perception.
Apart from films in which he employed motifs, means and techniques of the commercial film industry, Goldstein’s œuvre
also encompasses paintings, performances, and text and sound
works. The nine records in the Suite of Nine 7-Inch Records,
each with its own white cover, function simultaneously as objects
and as sound carriers. Their design, the colour of the vinyl,
and the brief descriptive titles on the labels correspond to the
sounds they reproduce, which were taken from commercial
archives. Without offering any explanatory narrative, the interplay
of colour, materiality, text and sound triggers a synesthetic
experience that produces a tension-charged pictorial world of
both individual and collective character and unsettling
effect.
3 Textures and surfaces
Within the framework of reviewing and reappraising Kostas
Murkudis’s archive, more than three hundred detail photographs
of his garments were taken for the purpose of documenting various material structures. These photos form a whole new world of
imagery, which—presented here for the first time with the aid
of multiple slide projection—allows the viewer to immerse himself
in the designer’s material cosmos.
Owing to the photographs’ unusual details and perspectives, it
is no longer possible to recognize the garments’ original sizes,
functions or significance. On the contrary, the various materials
become readable here as artistic means employed to create abstract compositions of fascinating dynamic and wealth of contrast.
4
The forms never appear detached from the material; instead,
they emerge from the exploration of the materials’ tensions, constraints and intrinsic shapes. In these images, the fabrics flow,
billow and fan out in their various structures and surfaces, overlapping, merging or contrasting with one another. Rather than
mere illustrations of static, inanimate matter, the photos can be
described as poetic momentary impressions of movement.
Nobuyoshi Araki (b. 1940 in Tokyo, JP)
The œuvre of the Japanese artist Nobuyoshi Araki is an homage
to his native city, Tokyo. As a self-appointed chronicler, Araki has
been accompanying the city’s development between tradition
and modernity for decades. Betraying the influence of the film
medium, his photos unite staged elements with ephemeral ones,
and the documentary with the fictitious.
The Tokyo Comedy series of 1997 is made up of urban scenes
(some of which were staged) and flower still lifes, and above all
the artist’s famous nude photographs showing women tied in the
elaborate traditional Japanese style of bondage, Kinbaku.
4 Imaginary Screen
In 1998 Kostas Murkudis was invited to the second Florence Fashion
Biennale, whose theme that year was fashion/cinema. Curated
by Terry Jones, the founder of i-D fashion magazine, the show was
devoted to the multifaceted relationships and reciprocal influences of fashion and film—an aspect that happens to be of key
significance for Murkudis’s œuvre. His contribution was a work
entitled Imaginary Screen. Small loudspeakers in the form of the
Parthenon’s ground plan were sewn into the phosphorescent material forming an oversized screen. The speakers produced a
delicate layer of sound that served to create an atmospheric effect
reminiscent of the sounds of nature. With its specific texture and
play of light and sound, the Imaginary Screen functioned like an
open projection surface that provided the listener/viewer associative and sensorial access to its materiality.
5
For the show at the MMK 2, Kostas Murkudis decided to revisit the
work and develop it further using an industrial fabric.
Yves Klein (1928 in Nice, FR – 1962 in Paris, FR)
Yves Klein’s deep fascination with spirituality and the expanse
and boundlessness of the universe left a strong mark on his artistic work. With his monochrome paintings, the artist—who was
also called “Yves le Monochrome”—opposed the representational
function of painting, focusing instead on pure colour as a form of
expression. In addition to rose and gold, he employed primarily
the ultramarine blue seen in the painting Monochrome Bleu, IKB
88 of 1959. In an endeavour to retain the intense luminosity of the
pure pigment even after it was fixed to the support, Klein developed the so-called International Klein Blue (IKB). He compared
the viewer to a sponge capable of absorbing the impalpable and
intangible sensitivity of colour.
5 Mood boards
The mood board is a classical working aid in fashion design and
provides insights into the starting point and various stages of
a complex creative process. It can contain memos, drawings,
material samples and photographs of inspirational sources or
of fittings with models.
For Murkudis, every collection is shaped by a “longing for the new”.
He never takes the same approach twice. On the contrary, his ideas
originate in his individual engagement with his surroundings.
Murkudis’s projects are often triggered by no more than a sentence,
or even just a word. After that initial spark, the most varied objects
and experiences, people and situations, encountered in everyday
life or on travels, can provide impulses for the concept’s development. Apart from the in-depth research into and testing of materials, the fittings and exhanges with the people who wear
his designs play a fundamental role in the elaboration of an idea.
6
Sigmar Polke (1941 in Oels/Silesia, PL – 2010 in Cologne, DE)
In 1968, Sigmar Polke created a portfolio containing fourteen offset prints of photographs produced in collaboration with Chris
Kohlhöfer. As already alluded to by the work’s title—Higher Powers Command—the brief captions describe actions those “higher
powers” have inspired and guided the artist in performing.
Whether Folding Rule Palm Tree, Defoliation of a Tree, or Correction of the Palmar Creases, the paradoxical artistic gestures
suggested by the subtitles transport the viewer into a bizarre pictorial world. In the process, Polke himself dodges responsibility
for the origins of the creative artistic process and transforms
the question as to the secret of the inspiration into a tongue-incheek comment on the myth of the artistic genius.
Tony Conrad (b. 1940 in Concord, New Hampshire, US)
Experimental filmmaker, musician and artist Tony Conrad’s Yellow
Movie 1/25 – 31/73 of 1973 comes from a work series bearing the
same title. The black frame on the large sheet of paper surrounds
a white rectangle coated with latex paint and reminiscent of a
small-scale projection screen. Exposure to light causes a gradual
yellowing of the paint, which thus illustrates time. With this work
series Conrad translated filmic and photographic methods into
painting. As the yellowing process continues inexorably and – for
the temporary viewer – invisibly, an abstract film of potentially
infinite duration is produced.
6 Collecting and objects
Special and unusual objects hold great fascination for Kostas
Murkudis, a fascination he often attributes to influences from
his childhood, for example the Green Vault in Dresden, the Karl
May Museum, and the art of Judo.
Murkudis does not think of himself exclusively as a fashion
designer, but frequently also creates objects, singly or in editions. Examples are the glass baseball bats produced in
collaboration with the Gustav van Treeck studios for mosaic
7
and glass painting, the glass object Chameleon in cooperation
with the Lobmeyr glass company, or an Adidas sneaker as a
special edition.
He keeps a number of these objects on an industrial shelving
system in his studio along with personal keepsakes. The shelf
served as the point of departure for the presentation at the
MMK, which unites a wide variety of items in the manner of a
cabinet of curiosities, and mirrors Murkudis’s passion for
collecting and designing objects. The latter here enter into
dialogue with rarely displayed artists’ editions and other works
from the MMK Collection to which Murkudis has developed
a special affinity—for example Tue Greenfort’s glass Medusa,
a carnivalesque mask by Jean Tinguely, or Andreas Slominski’s
neatly folded dish-washing, cleaning and dusting cloths.
Piero Manzoni (1933 in Soncino, Cremona, IT – 1963 in Milan, IT)
Piero Manzoni’s aim was to ban narrative content from painting.
In the Achromes workgroup he endeavoured to exclude everything superfluous and all conceivable interpretations from the
painting. The works were made by soaking the canvas in kaolin,
a substance used to produce paper and porcelain. With this process, Manzoni eliminated even colour from his œuvre. When
the soaked pieces of canvas were applied to burlap, their weight
brought about the creases characteristic of this workgroup.
7 The 2009–11 summer/spring collections
Kostas Murkudis is interested in modes of presentation that allow
the viewer to experience his designs in their materiality and
form, also independently of any function as articles of clothing.
Hovering freely before a brightly lit wall, the garments of various
spring/summer collections appear as light, permeable and
flexible membranes that dissolve the distinction between the
inner and the outer and take on an abstract quality.
Among Murkudis’s artistic concerns is the sensual experience
of materiality, desire, sexuality and the human skin, which he
8
regards as the primary supporting material. He frequently works
with transparent and skin-coloured cloths, which he contrasts
with stiff satins. The 2009 spring/summer collection is devoted
to the theme of lingerie, intimacy and direct contact to the body.
In combination with the sheer fabrics, experiments with the
shrinking and distortion of rubber bands through washing and
dyeing result in soft folds and gatherings that also distinguish
the extremely feminine quality of the 2010 spring/summer
collection. Responsible for the form here is a tubular plastic fabric
that creates spiral-shaped lines. For the 2011 spring/summer
collection Murkudis worked with double satin silks, layering them
in broad strips with latex and matting them with talcum on the
seams, edges and breast areas. The 2013 summer collection
likewise creates an interplay between presentation and concealment and is devoted to the topic of bondage. Japanese-style belts
and tops playfully combine transparence and opacity. Dresses,
casual trousers and skirts made of rubber form the body. Prismatic plastic foil vests echo the flirtation with transparence and refract the light.
Morris Louis (1912 in Baltimore, US – 1962 in Washington, US)
Morris Louis is considered a chief exponent of American colorfield painting. His paintings negate all illustrative and illusionistic
functions and concentrate instead on the pure appearance of
vibrant colour. Louis did not apply the paint with a brush, but,
employing the “staining” technique, poured it onto large-scale
canvases which he often did not mount on stretchers until shortly
before their purchase or exhibition.
First Coming of 1961 belongs to Louis’s last work complex, the
Stripes. The paint streams down the unprimed canvas in vertical
lanes. The stripes of colour begin in an asymmetrical arrangement near the upper edge, then cross the surface from top to
bottom and seem to continue beyond the lower edge, bearing the
motion of their evolution process within themselves. They look
like dynamic markings in a bright space.
9
8 20,164
In 2006, Kostas Murkudis presented a single, plain silk dress with
an underdress, both in pale pink. The following season he had
the same dress produced in an edition of 142, each in a different
colour. The 142 colours corresponded to the entire spectrum produced by a certain Italian silk manufacturer. Whereas Murkudis
had initially played with absolute reduction, the outer and under
garments of the 142 Dresses can be combined in 20,164 different
ways. This conceptual treatment of colour and form unites elements of uniformity and seriality with those of individuality and
endless diversity.
9 The 2011 spring/summer collection / Criarde, 2005
Kostas Murkudis is constantly in search of means of staging fashion that defy the conventions of the fashion world. To this end,
he frequently cooperates with artists. Within the framework of the
2010 exhibition Not in Fashion, carried out in collaboration with
Carsten Nicolai, Murkudis realized a multi-media fashion show of
his 2011 spring/summer collection at the MMK 1, in which a wide
range of sensory impressions merged and overlapped in a synesthetic experience. To the accompaniment of a sound collage,
light patterns were projected on the models. As a result, the garments were in many cases no longer individually perceivable
as such, but merged indistinguishably with their surroundings,
the body, light and colour.
Movement, the sensual exchange with the article of clothing,
and thus the performative potential of fashion were also the
focus of the short film Criarde by director Lars Knorrn. The work
was produced in 2005 for the MoDe! exhibition organized by
the Goethe-Institut in Japan.
John Chamberlain (1927 in Rochester, US – 2011 in New York, US)
Within the framework of his investigations of the aesthetic
qualities of materials foreign to art, John Chamberlain employed not only car body parts but also foam rubber. For the
10
1967 work Funburn, he used a cord to tie foam rubber elements
together in such a way as to create an organic-looking figure.
Here the cord served a form-generating function, but without
completely dominating the material. Rather, it accentuates the
inherent formative qualities of the foam, its specific visual
structure and haptic character. The work thus performs a balancing act between the pliability and the intractability of its
material.
10 The 2012–14 autumn/winter collections
For Kostas Murkudis, articles of clothing are “architectural bodies”. He is interested in the sensitive space that is created
between the fabric and the human body. As seen in the 2012–14
autumn/winter collections on display here, Murkudis makes
frequent use of materials that already possess strong intrinsic
formative powers of their own. Owing to his sculptural treatment
of the materials, his garments take on an object-like presence.
For the asymmetrical cuts of his 2013 autumn/winter collection,
which takes its inspiration from the theme of interior decoration,
Murkudis employed stiff, brittle materials such as raffia, horsehair
and imitation leather to construct generous volumes. Within the
framework of the unisex autumn/winter collection of 2012, for
which the work of the Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino
(1905–1973)—and especially the latter’s photos of the skier Leo
Gasperl—served as the point of departure, Murkudis combined
natural loden with reflective safety material from the area of
sportswear, as well as foam rubber covered with various silks,
some printed. The joining of traditional and unusual materials and
the redefinition—but also the up/downgrading—of those materials that came about as a result, are two aspects likewise of key
significance for the 2014 autumn/winter collection. Here Murkudis processed (among other materials) strips of industrial foil in
the manner of classical fabric. The object-like self-containment of
the garments that so strongly distinguishes the 2012 and 2013
collections is partially tempered here by the combination of stiff
11
sailcloth with transparent and soft materials such as silk and
tulle. With individual green and blue lines traversing the garments
like markings, Murkudis makes reference to the work of the
American artist Barnett Newman and the latter’s explorations of
surface and line in abstract painting.
Blinky Palermo (1943 in Leipzig, DE – 1977 in Kurumba, MV)
In the 1960s and ’70s, Blinky Palermo developed an œuvre that
challenged the boundaries of painting anew.
The work black / brown from his “fabric paintings” series looks
at first sight like an abstract painting; at the same time, however,
it negates painting’s most characteristic attribute: the application
of paint by the artist. Rather than composing the zones of colour
on the canvas by means of a painterly process, the artist sewed
two pieces of industrially manufactured, dyed cotton together and
then mounted the resulting work on a stretcher. The composition
represents a pictorial exploration of the relationship between
the two colour zones; the “horizon” they form triggers associations with landscape. At the same time, however, the work’s
unusual materiality lends it a physical quality that brings out its
object character. black / brown thus addresses the tensioncharged interface at which material becomes a pictorial composition and a pictorial composition emerges in its materiality.
Steven Parrino (1958 New York, US – 2005 New York, US)
Whereas the upper section of canvas in Snake Lake has been
stretched to a taut strip of black, the rest of the monochrome
colour field has evidently slipped out of its original form and
hangs in numerous folds. Steven Parrino referred to his works as
misshaped canvasses in an allusion to American painter Frank
Stella’s famous shaped canvasses. From the 1960s onward, Stella
had defied the traditional rectangular format of painting with
canvasses of various shapes, thus emphasizing the object quality
of the work above and beyond its depictive function and in its
relationship to space.
12
Dan Flavin (1933 in New York, US – 1996 in New York, US)
Dan Flavin is considered a key exponent of American Minimal Art.
His geometric, often serially arranged and industrially produced
works avoid any referential function beyond their form, materiality and presence in a specific place.
The artist used commercially available fluorescent tubes to investigate a traditional topos of the visual arts—light and shade. His
works testify to a painterly treatment of light that brings forth fields
and strips of colour in a wide variety of nuances and intensities.
The work Untitled (to Barbara Nüsse) of 1971, for example, creates
a delicate colour space. In their appearance and meaning, the
works are always also linked to the perspective, movement and
perception of the viewer sensitized to his own surroundings.
Robert Longo (b. 1953 in New York, US)
Robert Longo produced these large-scale black-and-white
Untitled lithographs in 1985 within the framework of his Men in
the Cities series inspired by a film still of a shooting scene from
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1970 work The American Soldier.
Showing elegantly dressed persons carrying out extreme movements in front of a white background, Longo’s prints possess a
quality of energy-charged snapshots. In their expressive corporeality, the anonymous big-city dwellers resemble dancers of ecstatic vitality but at the same time seem strangely adrift and isolated in their gestures, as wild as they are graceful, between
abandon and defence, euphoria and struggle. The artist based the
works on photographs he took of his friends on the roof of his New
York studio while pelting them with tennis balls, then enlarged
with the aid of a projector and finally translated into painstakingly
executed drawings.
11 Overalls, 2012
Two nappa overalls in black and off-white form the centre of the
installation in the darkened room. They ‘converse’ with a Japanese-style screen made of semi-transparent, skin-coloured latex.
13
Overalls have long held a firm place in Murkudis’s repertoire and
reveal his fascination with the uniform and the androgynous,
with the military aesthetic, the functional.
12
Digital Memory, 2010–15
“I like the ephemeral. Ideally, the things that happen before or
after, where the human being shows herself and breaks through
the perfection.”
The shots from Kostas Murkudis’s pictorial archive as well as two
series of backstage photos offer the most intimate insights into
the designer’s work. The archival images feed on a wide range of
everyday observations, but also on pop culture, art and film.
Often snapped with an i-phone, the shots come about within the
framework of Murkudis’s research, serve his as sources of inspiration, and shed light on his very personal connection to his
surroundings.
Murkudis’s approach is distinguished by an endeavour to come as
close as possible to the genuine, the vital and the authentic that
suddenly appears in seemingly trivial moments. He is interested
in photography as a medium not so much to record staged scenes
but to capture passing moments, which he compares to film stills.
Already in the early years of his career, he always had photos taken backstage during his fashion shows in addition to the usual
perfectly staged lookbook shots. The views of the autumn/winter
show in Paris taken by Mark Borthwick in 1997 behind the scenes
of a Paris fashion show (also see station 13) provide access to
the fashion world above and beyond the clichés of flawless, virtually identical models and are characterized by great sensitivity,
intimacy and closeness.
14
Juergen Teller (b. 1964 in Erlangen, DE)
In the late 1980s, following his studies at the state photography
academy in Munich, Juergen Teller embarked on his career
in London, where he soon began publishing his photos in such
prominent magazines as i-D and Face. Teller’s photographic
works take a direct and intimate, humorous and provocative look
at the side-lines of the fashion world and the celebrity culture,
outside the focus of the typical unapproachable stagings of perfection, sparkle and glamour.
The shots taken in 1993/94 in the backstage spaces of Helmut
Lang fashion shows serve as a reference to the beginnings of
Kostas Murkudis’s career. Murkudis worked with Lang closely
as an assistant for seven years (1986–93), a phase that would
prove formative for his development.
13 The 1997 autumn/winter collection
With the silent film Out of Passion, director Jaci Judelson documented the Paris Fashion Week for the BBC in the spring of 1997.
The filmic collage includes backstage and onstage takes of
Kostas Murkudis’s 1997 autumn/winter collection. Thanks to its
non-focus and dynamic camera work, it is distinguished by an
atmospheric aesthetic of immediacy and ephemerality. The camera scans faces, bodies, surfaces and materials, and at times
comes so close to the garments and the models that they are
virtually no longer identifiable.
The 1997 autumn/winter collection developed out of the designer’s
exploration of historical and contemporary elements of Japanese
culture and was created a year before he actually visited that
country for the first time. The conceptual point of departure for
the collection: rather than himself, Murkudis had the singer
Deborah Harry of the New York New Wave band Blondie embark
on a fictitious trip to Japan—“Blondie in Tokyoto”.
15
Franz Erhard Walther (1939 in Fulda, DE)
The artist radically expanded the concept of sculpture with his
work. Characterized by openness and changeability of form,
his participatory textile works depart from the static, self-contained art object and demand a redefinition of the relationship
between the work and the viewer. Executed between 1963 and
1969, his First Work Set consists of fifty-eight elements made
primarily of muslin. As the photographs by Timm Rautert (b. 1941
in Tuchel, DE) show, these textiles are not just to be passively
viewed by the recipient, but actively used—i.e. stepped on,
picked up, worn and recombined.
14 The 2014 spring/summer collection
The 2014 spring/summer collection is entitled 4D – A Tribute to
Franz Erhard Walther and represents Murkudis’s hitherto most
radical break with the conventions of the fashion world and its
presentation forms as well as his most direct dialogue with the
visual arts. With this collection, which consists solely of unica, the
fashion designer makes reference—with regard to form and presentation alike—to a key work in the MMK Collection: Franz Erhard
Walther’s First Work Set.
After the manner of Franz Erhard Walther’s concept of the artwork’s “vitalization”, Murkudis staged the collection performatively in the exhibition rooms of a gallery in Berlin. As abstract
forms, the articles of clothing were arranged to create a floor installation. One after the other, they were donned by a model, set
in motion, and transformed from two- into three-dimensionality.
As a result, the dynamic relationship between material, form,
body and space that underlies Murkudis’s work became manifest
in a new way.
16
Imprint
At Close Range Kostas Murkudis and the MMK Collection
is on view at the MMK 2 of the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst
am Main from 17 July 2015 to 14 February 2016.
Director MMK: Dr. Susanne Gaensheimer
Curator of the exhibition: Peter Gorschlüter
Visitors' guide edited by: Ramona Heinlein, Peter Gorschlüter,
Daniela Denninger, Julia Haecker, Christina Henneke
Translation: Judith Rosenthal
Made possible by:
Founding Partners:
Media Partners:
The MMK 2 has been made possible by the TaunusTurm, a joint venture of Tishman
Speyer and the Commerz Real AG. The founding partners are Stefan Quandt, the
Ernst Max von Grunelius-Stiftung, the Helaba Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen and
the DekaBank Deutsche Girozentrale. Further sponsors are the MMK Stiftung, the
Freunde des MMK and the New Contemporaries.
Public Guided Tours:
Saturday/Sunday: 4 pm (in German)
Every second Saturday: 2.30 pm (in English)
For further information about the exhibition visit our museum
blog: www.mmk-notes.com.
Also visit „mmkfrankfurt“ on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.
MMK 2
MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst
Taunustor 1
60310 Frankfurt am Main
Phone + 49 (0) 69 212 30 44 7
Fax + 49 (0) 69 212 37 88 2
www.mmk-frankfurt.de
Photo: 2015 spring/summer collection
Photo: Casper Sejersen