ANTWERP.- The Antwerp Public Art Collection (Kunst in de Stad—Middelheim Museum) proudly presents Blinds, a newly commissioned permanent artwork by Martin Margiela. This sculpture marks the first public work by Margiela, who first gained cultural acclaim as a fashion designer and has dedicated himself to visual arts since 2008.

Blinds was created for the Schuttershofstraat, a recently redesigned historical street in the center of Antwerp. The many shop windows, the casual strolling of people who enjoy seeing and being seen, as well as urban grittiness and unpredictability: all these elements informed Margiela’s work. As such, Blinds follows the Antwerp Public Art Collection’s ethos of site-responsive commissioning.

Stillness and movement

Margiela places an object we associate with privacy—a slatted curtain to hide behind, away from the gaze of others – in full view. What exactly is hidden by it, however, remains a mystery. The artist plays a game with the passer-by who is free to imagine what is being obscured. Whoever tries to look “behind the curtain” by walking around the circular sculpture always ends up back at square one. The silver slats hang still, while urban life rushes by. The artwork appears as a mirage, a perpetual dream and a nod to Belgian surrealism, a great inspiration for Margiela. As painter René Magritte said: ‘Everything we see hides another thing, we always desire to see what is hidden by what is visible.’ Blinds captures the excitement of something waiting to be revealed. It feels like something is about to happen, but the artwork remains forever motionless.

The city as a place of wonder

The city and its public space have long been an important source of inspiration for Margiela. In previous visual work, he borrowed seemingly banal objects from the urban environment and transforms them in a surreal way, such as a plastic traffic cone covered in luscious fur. With Blinds, Margiela now makes the opposite movement: he introduces a curtain - an everyday domestic object—into public space. What results from these inversions or transformative gestures is a sense of wonder and estrangement.

Blinds shares with Margiela’s previous work, as a fashion designer and as a visual artist, a great sensitivity to materials and processes of change. Traces of time or touch are not hidden or undone but are incorporated in the material execution of his work. Blinds is made of stainless steel, an industrial material, sanded to mimic the texture of textile, and finally plated with palladium, a silver-coloured goldleaf-like material that will fade over time.

Project credits

Commissioner: City of Antwerp. Curator: Samuel Saelemakers, Antwerp Public Art Collection—Middelheim Museum. Production: Art Casting, Oudenaarde.

Blinds is part of the Antwerp Public Art Collection.