Belgian accessories designer Christophe Coppens has been the go-to name for royals and fashionistas for 21 years. Yet after many successful years he shut down his business and filed for bankruptcy in 2012, claiming that “you can’t be a good artist with the mentality of a fashion designer. And I didn’t succeed at being a part-time artist.”
In an effort to break from his old life (and woes), he cut up and destroyed all of his clothes and belongings, and went on to create sculptures, or “mountains”, as he calls them, out of the remains.
Coppens transformed the essential objects, tokens of his old lifestyle, into art. Like an artificial mound, everything is buried under these so-called mountains, as the pieces were created using material sourced from his past that became idle to him as a former designer, and gained a new meaning to him as an artist.
They are just as colorful and surrealistic as the accessories and millinery he produced as designer. For instance, there is a stuffed shirt, which seems to have swallowed its wearer, or a landscape depicting a heap of credit cards with a range of tarot cards as a frame. The small mountains are often covered in silk, shiny powder or glitter. The work produced for this exhibition, “Everything is Local, Part 1” was commissioned by the “Han Nefkens Fashion on the Edge” initiative, which focuses on the boundary between fashion and art.
Christophe Coppens
Everything Is Local, Landscape Part 1
Until 2 June 2013
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam