Helmut Lang, the Viennese master of deconstruction and minimalism, who made a name for himself in the late 80s and early 90s fashion with his sharp, austere and intellectual designs has left fashion without looking back in 2005, devoting himself solely to his art ever since.
Over the past decade, he has developed an artistic practice founded in enigmatic interventions and characterised by a distinct use of materials and textures. Often created in series, his sculptural works explore organic variations that occur when working extensively with a single medium. Lang acquires his materials from diverse sources and repurposes them, baring their histories of former use.
In first US institutional solo show, evocatively called “Burry“ and curated by Peter Doroshenko, he is proposing enigmatic sculptures in gold, white and black, made out of sheepskin and treated with tar hovering between supported and self-sufficient in the Dallas Contemporary art museum. The exhibition focuses on the transfiguration of the sheepskin, a soft and warm material by changing its original purpose, mutilating it and transforming it into a cold material shaped into abstract sculptures with almost mythological undercurrents to it and with a brand new conscience and royal powers.
As the writer and the show’s installer, Neville Wakefield says, the exhibit is a larger meditation on acts of creative destruction and the gestures of reassembly and renewal that attend them” that not only scratches the surface but it also striking your soul.