Iris van Herpen’s Brooklyn Museum exhibition turns fashion into a study of matter, light, and perception
At the Brooklyn Museum, Iris van Herpen’s work is being presented on a scale that underscores how far her practice has moved beyond the runway. “Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses,” which first opened in 2023 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, has arrived in New York as its largest iteration, bringing together garments and artworks that treat the body as a site of experimentation.
Van Herpen joined the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture in 2011, at age 27, and has spent the years since building a vocabulary that draws as much from science as from dressmaking. Her work includes 3D-printed garments and a dress that emits light using 125 million bioluminescent algae, details that help explain why her practice is often discussed in the same breath as contemporary art.
The Brooklyn presentation extends that conversation by placing van Herpen alongside artists whose work shares her interest in nature, technology, and altered perception. Anicka Yi (b. 1971, Seoul), whose studio practice often resembles a laboratory, is represented here by a body of work that reflects her scientific approach. Yi’s first large-scale outdoor project, “Anicka Yi: Message from the Mud,” opened this May at Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley and offers a microbiological portrait of the landscape through algae, cyanobacteria, and microbes responding to sunlight and time.
Tara Donovan (b. 1969, New York City) appears with “Untitled” (2009), a mylar and hot-glue sculpture that echoes van Herpen’s own interest in crystalline forms and organic-looking structures. The work is shown alongside van Herpen’s “Aeriform” dress, a gravity-defying design made with the artist Philip Beesley.
The exhibition also includes Tomás Saraceno (b. 1973, Tucuman, Argentina), whose practice centers on spiders, web sonification, and 3D-mapping technology, and Cindy Ji Hye Kim (b. 1990, Incheon, South Korea), whose translucent silk paintings reveal carved stretchers beneath the surface. In different ways, each artist extends van Herpen’s central question: how can art make visible the systems, materials, and forces that usually remain hidden?
That question gives the Brooklyn Museum presentation its quiet force. Rather than framing fashion as a separate category, the exhibition places it within a broader field of contemporary making, where biotechnology, architecture, and the natural world are increasingly intertwined.
