Virgil Abloh’s first solo exhibition opens at Museum of Modern Artwork Chicago

A serious retrospective of the work of designer Virgil Abloh has opened in Chicago, bringing collectively the whole lot from architectural constructions to Nike sneaker designs and slogan rugs for IKEA.

On present on the Museum of Modern Artwork Chicago (MCA), Figures of Speech is curated by Michael Darling, and designed by Abloh and Samir Bantal, director of OMA’s in-house analysis and design studio AMO.

It’s the first solo exhibition for the American designer who made his identify working for Kanye West, and is now CEO of style model Off-White and males’s inventive director at Louis Vuitton.

Protecting the museum’s fourth flooring, Figures of Speech explores the completely different worlds that Virgil strikes in, protecting style, design, music, artwork and structure.

The slogans that present a typical thread in Abloh’s designs characteristic all through.

“For me, Figures of Speech is an artwork exhibition rooted in promoting and the projected picture,” defined Abloh.

“Any time an concept takes form on a selected floor – a photograph print, a display, a billboard, or canvas – it turns into actual. This exhibition demonstrates how I wrestle with this idea free of anyone medium, in search of private and particular options,” he continued.

“This 20-year survey reveals how I’m consistently in search of a method to remodel myself from client to producer, navigating a path between vacationer and purist, between the literal and the figurative.”

A brilliant corridor options dozens of Abloh’s sneaker designs for Nike, offered alongside canvases printed with “ADVERTISE HERE” and “TELEVISION”.

A glowing pink room is fronted by a translucent pink curtain, with the phrase “BLUE” printed on prime. Subsequent to it’s a large CD case, consultant of Abloh’s album artwork for Kanye West’s Yeezus in 2013.

Architectural designs embody a sky blue ladder and an identical Hacienda Column, made in collaboration with London designer Ben Kelly.

In a single room, furnishings is stacked up haphazardly over a pile of the rugs Abloh created with IKEA, which characteristic slogans together with “KEEP OFF” and “WET GRASS”.

Elsewhere, Off-White clothes are displayed on vibrant racks, together with a black and white piece designed for Beyoncé in 2018.

A few of Abloh’s Off-White items are even on the market, in a pop-up retailer known as Church and State. The gathering recreates a choice of 20 bestselling Off-White merchandise which might be now not out there, reimagined completely for the MCA.

“This present examines the alternatives Virgil has made, the media he works with, and the context of his creative inspiration,” mentioned Michael Darling, who’s the MCA’s chief curator.

“His initiatives have unfurled with intention, precision, critique, historic consciousness, cultural sensitivity, and rigour, and when taken out of the buzzy, frothy context of luxurious style, movie star mannequins, and hip-hop one-upmanship, a really measured imaginative and prescient emerges.”

The exhibition design consists of chrome stainless-steel shelving, retractable accordion-like doorways and industrial PVC plastic curtains. Flooring-to-ceiling images by German style photographer Juergen Teller cowl among the partitions.

Virgil Abloh hacks the Vitra archive to create imaginative and prescient of a house in 2035

In a single house, partitions are painted black and the vaulted ceiling above is colored yellow. Right here, monotone figures stand in entrance of a glowing signal that reads “YOU’RE OBVIOUSLY IN THE WRONG PLACE” – a chunk from 2015.

“Important to this exhibition, Figures of Speech was for me to strategy it with my architectural mind set,” mentioned Abloh, who has a civil engineering diploma from the College of Wisconsin–Madison and masters in structure from the Illinois Institute of Know-how.

“Transferring between style, artwork, design and music, Virgil has a strong palette to select from,” Bantal added. “Leaning on his structure coaching, he creates a potent combination of those elements making his attain in up to date in style tradition extraordinarily efficient.”

Virgil Abloh was born in 1980 in Illinois, to Ghanaian immigrant mother and father. A defining profession transfer got here with an internship at Fendi alongside Kanye West, which led to a long-standing collaboration between the pair that launched Abloh into the general public eye.

He was named by Time journal as one of many 100 most influential folks on this planet in 2018.

Figures of Speech is on present from 10 June to 22 September 2019, and can then journey internationally. It’s the newest in a collection of collaborations between Abloh and AMO – the pair are additionally working collectively on a brand new Off-White retailer in Miami.

Pictures is by Nathan Keay and Peter McCullough, courtesy of MCA.