Rebel Fashion Icon Martin Margiela brings his Renegade Art to Athens

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What: The Bernier-Eliades Gallery presents a double solo show featuring the works of the Belgian artist Martin Margiela in both Athens and Brussels. Margiela’s diverse visual practice spans various media, including painting, sculpture, installation, collage, and film. Margiela magnifies both disruptions and poetic junctions, seeking beauty in the fleeting. Margiela’s work is dedicated to the unknown and the surprising, combined with an exceptional sensibility for materials.

For the show in Athens, Margiela transforms the Gallery and creates a captivating atmosphere – his work undoubtedly holds a certain romanticism, even though he is known for his radicalism. In Margiela’s work, the human body itself is by no means overlooked. It is transformed into individualized parts, objects of study and observation, and its potential for evolution knows no bounds. In his “Torsos” series, a shoulder, a neck, and a torso melt into a base of identical material (with a touch of flesh), suddenly raising questions about the tradition of exhibiting and the way of looking. The black or flesh-colored silicone “Kits” spark guessing and play with the fragmented body parts, evoking childhood memories of building toys found in laundry packets. In “Vanitas” as the son of a hairdresser, the artist reminds the viewer of the relentless march of time, symbolized by the change in hair color from childhood to old age.