'Kolovrat: between chaos, order and entropy'
by Miguel Matos in 2009-07-10
Miguel Matos is the founder and director of Umbigo magazine and editor of Time Out Lisboa’s art section.
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“I have found out that: that which relates to the body necessarily relates to the space”, says Lidija Kolovrat, the Bosnia born creator that, since 1990, has chosen Portugal as her emotional territory.
Throughout his artistic research, Lucio Fontana thought about clothing as a natural extension and evolution of his work popping out of the canvas he had already quartered in a quest for new areas of visual intervention. According to Germano Celant, the curator of the 1996 Florence Biennale dedicated to the subject of fashion and entitled Looking at Fashion, Fontana was searching for “the boundary between the inner and the outer, between fabric and skin, between clothing and nudity”. Lidija Kolovrat’s work may well be placed within this particular artistic tradition.
The artist cuts, tears, glues, burns, joins and separates, recycles and abandons. With this paradoxical movement, Lidija Kolovrat creates her work from controlled chaos. Everything is the result of spontaneity and yet nothing is left to chance. The apparent improvisation is always pondered, calculated. She holds back from experimenting until after the foundations of her work are launched. The search for materials’ volumes and twists, as well as for thread and colour distortions, are strategies in a quest, in a pursuit of mutable and mutant means of plastic expression. The body appears as the foundation of a piece; it is not the piece that serves the body. Clothes (and we are speaking of clothing as the nomenclature of a certain object that may be autonomous, i.e. the object per se) do not commend the body, they do not serve the body; instead, they convey ideas, messages, concerns. Just as the anti-drawing that in the end resorted to amorphous objects, which by this very quality would become defined and emerge from the paper and the materials, Kolovrat creates pieces of clothing that may be considered anti-clothes (?) as they seem to shift away from the three-dimensional trait that traditionally characterizes a cloth intended for the body. These pieces are like canvases that can be worn, or like skirts that can be hung. They are like silk-screen fabrics, painted and carved directly with no apparent regard for the body, but ultimately taking it into consideration. In extreme cases, a piece no longer applies to the body to represent it or to symbolize it; the absence of the body conveys autonomy to the piece. Dresses are united by two arms like a ring of bodies in a performance. All this experimentalism seizes materials and processes that are characteristic of fashion, and it is fashion; however, it uses the language of the arts creating a hybrid product with a disturbing, provocative and sometimes random result. These elements originating from a philosophical or social world are subsequently chewed and turned down to give way to clothing – Clothing as medium and not as a purpose.
She endeavours to express and to rethink a way of life, to highlight freedom, to bring art closer to everyday life in the same way artists devise the work of art as a whole. Revisiting the context of futuristic art and its relation with fashion, and rejecting the constraints of visual arts, author Florence Müller alludes to Marinetti and Giacomo Balla’s aesthetics of the ephemeral whose fabric was the materialization of “elements of synthesis studied in painting, such as the speed-line, the noise forms and the chromatic rhythms”. Along the same lines that guided the futurists, Lidija Kolovrat repositions the individual in the social and urban scene, highlighting social phenomena and triggering an inquiry on where we stand before the physical world and the world of ideas, and on political and ideological constraints. We cannot consider a unifying concept of her work but rather a leitmotiv that, reacting against fleeting and mundane fashion, remains true to the recreational use of these pieces, thus accentuating the uniqueness of those who wear it, instead of mirroring the trends of a particular time.
In one of her most successful collections, the artist sets fire to a red skirt and in doing so she practically burns her entire studio. In another experience, a friend is persuaded to put on a coat that is subsequently wrapped in latex immobilizing him for hours. In the end it takes a pair of scissors to set him free, and the cuts ultimately redefine the openings of the coat revealing its final shape and look – was this the final act of a performance? A worn out jacket acquires an extra semantic layer once a drawing is made on it with lit cigarette ends. Leather jackets rendered obsolete by the change in trends along a 20-year period acquire new volumes by means of subverting the normal use. This is Lidija Kolovrat’s method: to take the rules, the standard things, to rethink them and to present them in the light of her ecologic, social and political concerns.
Lidija is currently changing her creative disposition. She is leaving behind her already historic Pedro e o Lobo studio/gallery where she also keeps her KolovratLab and she is progressively moving away from the scene of Moda Lisboa [Lisbon Fashion Week], the venue where her collections are shown to the general public and to the press. From now on her devoted clients will be invited to a new pod. The studio will be situated in her own home and the collections will be shown in galleries and other less conventional venues taking the indistinctness and multidisciplinarity of her pieces even further.
This auction works as an update, a historic glance, a retrospective reflection on twenty years of the work of Lidija Kolovrat.
Lots on sale at 'Lidija Kolovrat - 20 years in fashion'
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Miguel Matos is the founder and director of Umbigo magazine and editor of Time Out Lisboa’s art section. As a journalist he underlines his collaboration with magazines such as Vogue Portugal, Maxima, Icon and City. He has recently dedicated himself to curatorial projects in the field of contemporary arts and he writes texts for visual arts exhibitions.
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