Group show Just What Is It
Part I of Collection #3 Gallery Chamber New York, 2016
curated by Matylda Krzykowski

Pavillon de l’Elégance, Madame rêve and Pli Permanent are petrified sketches of a moment. Ephemeral movements of fashion transformed in static sculptures. For decades, fashion has lost all functional relationships to the female body and only exists as a folding and unfolding of the self. We are left with status, confidence and story telling as ornaments of the self, and with the empty suggestion of a body beneath the folds. The body is framework in Stephanie Baechler’s work yet it can be totally absent. It’s relationship to space through the motionless power of the fabric re-examines notions of beauty and misplaces functionality. By using ceramics, this highly unlikely material deconstructs the language of fashion and freezes it in the middle of movement, giving the sculptures presence and permanence.

Text from the exhibtion

Pictures by Lauren Coleman & Fran Parente