PARIS.- For his first solo show, Lafayette Anticipations invites Martin Margiela to take possession of and transform every one of its spaces.

The show presents, for the first time in public, over forty works: installations, sculptures, collages, paintings and films. It also puts forward a hypothesis: that Martin Margiela has always been an artist. Internationally renowned in the fashion world since the late 1980s, throughout his career as a designer, he deliberately upended the conventions of fashion one by one, through runway shows, materials and forms that became conceptual and aesthetic revolutions.

With bold conviction, he has pushed art beyond the boundaries usually devolved to it, constantly inventing new zones for experience by endlessly extending the limits of the work. The exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations, which is designed as a total artwork, carries on Martin Margiela’s obsession with transformation. Turning habits upside-down, visitors enter through the emergency exit, then immerse themselves in a labyrinthine show where works appear and disappear at various vantage points along the way.

In a typically iconoclastic way, Martin Margiela has worked with multiple media. His references give equal value to a Caravaggio painting as a box of hair dye. Together, these borrowings form the portrait of an artist who has never stopped questioning how we see things and how we pay attention.

The works on show, most of which were made in the Foundation’s studio, return to the artist’s obsessions. The body is very much in evidence: anatomies inspired by the academic tradition; hair and skin in almost abstract form, signs of the passing of time. Disappearance is an omnipresent theme. Martin Margiela has never been afraid of absence or disappearance. He believes the life of an object or a being never ends, but is in constant mutation, renewing any number of times. The very idea of an end is pure fantasy; incompletion is a fundamental state.

Going against the tide of dominant values, Martin Margiela celebrates the beauty to be found in the vulnerable, the fragile and the fleeting. By refocusing our perspectives, he transforms the banal and the trivial into opportunities for discovery, wonderment and surprise.

« Martin Margiela is an artist. For over twenty years, he has never ceased to offer new areas of experience. His talent is expressed through all mediums, and his work from fashion to performance to painting, he is constantly and painting, is constantly expanding the territories of art. of art. He constantly pushes us to question our our view of the world. The passage of time, chance, the secret the secret, are themes that nourish his work and and renew our perspectives. Against the current of dominant values, Martin Margiela and his work cultivate mystery, an obsession with disappearance, discreet beings beings, neglected objects, unnoticed places and events. unnoticed. He elevates them to a new dignity. » --Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, Director of Lafayette Anticipations and curator of the exhibition




« It is as if Martin Margiela felt he had to conceal the art - the painted surface - not as a refusal to share or show anything, but rather by creating a position for himself in the art. A position which, given his place in the discipline of fashion, seems at first uncomfortable, but which is resolved by a rather literal return to the essential conditions of the artistic medium. » --Chris Dercon, President of Réunion des musées nationaux - Grand Palais

Martin Margiela was born in 1957 in Leuven, Belgium, to a Polish father and a Belgian mother. He lives and works between Paris and Belgium. As a teenager, he attended the Sint-Lukas Kunsthumaniora art school in Hasselt, Belgium, for three years, then entered the fashion department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 1977.

After graduating, he worked as a freelancer in Italy and Belgium before moving to Paris, where he became JeanPaul Gaultier’s first assistant from 1984 to 1987. Maison Martin Margiela was founded in 1988 in the same city with a unique and avant-garde style, far from traditional references.

Martin Margiela was the first designer to introduce recycling in his creations, using army socks, broken crockery, flea market clothing, and plastic packaging, among other things. His outfits show signs of wear and tear and his fashion often goes beyond the boundaries of clothing. The locations chosen for his fashion shows are equally unconventional: an abandoned metro station, an SNCF warehouse, and a vacant lot that has become legendary.

Early on, Margiela forged links with the art world through exhibitions at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery (Paris) and institutions such as BOZAR (Brussels), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam), Haus der Kunst (Munich), LACMA (Los Angeles), and Somerset House (London).

In 1997, while continuing to work for his own label, he was a surprise appointment as creative director for women’s ready-towear for Hermès. He worked there for twelve seasons until 2003. In 2008, he decided to leave fashion just after the twentieth anniversary show of Maison Martin Margiela.

Since then, he has devoted himself exclusively to the visual arts. His first solo exhibition, at the invitation of the Lafayette Anticipations Foundation in Paris, will open in October 2021.