Mix & Match
Photo Credit: ©Felix Jungo Photography
For the first time, the exhibition Mix & Match - with around one thousand works from the Nicola Erni Collection - consciously combines and intuitively relates fashion photography and contemporary art. These juxtapositions are often unexpected, visually surprising and playful, and they are offering new discoveries and interpretations.
The exhibition takes the visitor also on a journey through one hundred years of fashion photography, showcasing new ways of exploring and establishing this genre as a museum art form. As well was presenting high fashion from the 1930s to the present, it extends the definition of fashion photography by including street style: “High-fashion photography embodies the life to which we aspire, street photography the life we actually lead. Shown together, we see one influence the other, and vice versa.”
The exhibition opens with three works by British photographer Martin Parr, who shot an editorial for US Vogue in 2019 and chose a museum space as the backdrop for the latest fashion. The result is a symbiosis of fashion photography and contemporary art offering a glimpse into the exhibition's theme.
The exhibition Mix & Match is organized around thirteen thematic focal points. The centerpiece of the exhibition - Fashion Photography. From Magazine to Artwork - reflects the context of fashion photography, reminding us that it was originally commissioned as commercial work for fashion magazines, editorials, and fashion campaigns.
“What likely began as a personal preference and an intuitive idea soon manifested itself as a visionary collection strategy and a pioneering take on a medium that is often misunderstood and still neglected in the art world. With her characteristic enthusiasm and flamboyant spirit of discovery, Nicola was among the first to realize—later followed by others—a much-needed, in-depth, but delightfully playful development of an important collection and an appraisal of fashion photography as a key form of artistic expression in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” Max Hollein
The exhibition Mix & Match was curated in collaboration with Birgit Filzmaier, Zurich.