Josiah MC Elheny - Interactions of the Abstract Body

Exploring how the constantly shifting forms of fashion often reveal the core beliefs and assumptions of any given era, Josiah McElheny’s two exhibitions at White Cube, Some Thoughts about the Abstract Body and Interactions of the Abstract Body–recorded in this volume–look at how fashions in clothing and modernism intersected and influenced each other. Using examples of artistic clothing and costume design as a starting point to present his own set of models for abstract form today, McElheny investigates the connections between the history of visual abstraction and the clothing created by artists over the past century, whose work proposed a more subjective, less universal experience of abstraction. Recalling his exhibitions from 1999 and 2000, a series of projects about Christian Dior and the creativity of factory workers, this body of work also partly revisits such themes.