The Art of Hermès

About

This group exhibition features seminal works by Yayoi Kusama, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Andy Warhol and more, and are situated alongside the fashion world’s most iconic handbags, as we examine their interchangeable characteristic that highlight how exclusive luxury items such as the Hermès bags and art are increasingly becoming inextricably linked.

Hermès was founded in Paris in 1837 by Thierry Hermès, originally as a harness workshop that catered to European nobility. Initially, Hermès leather bags were produced to feed horses and house their saddles. It was not until almost a century later that the atelier expanded its clientele to include the fashion elite and collectors.  The evolution came in 1922 as a result of Emile-Maurice Hermès, Thierry Hermès’ grandson, who designed their first handbag after his wife Julie had complained that she was unable to find a simple and elegant bag to carry around with her. Named the Sac à dépêches, the bag stemmed directly from the original saddle bag designs on which the company had been founded.

Throughout the subsequent decades Hermès has successfully continued its focus on building a brand known and celebrated for its high-quality and rareness.  Each bag is individually handmade and expertly stitched together using the double needle saddle stitch that cannot be reproduced by machine and, if done correctly, will never unravel. Created in specialist ateliers by highly skilled craftsmen and women, no two bags are the same and each is distinctly unique; every bag is assigned an individual serial number, stamped with an alphabetical letter to denote its year of production, and is made in very limited numbers each year. Their exclusivity has been met with huge demand, making some bags highly sought after and often virtually unobtainable.

The worlds of art and fashion have always been linked through their creative stances with artists often crossing over to design products for luxury fashion houses. However, what elevates Hermès handbags to fine art status are the same attributes that art collectors look for when acquiring a work of art; their pieces are unique, iconic, instantly recognisable, in limited supply and of the highest quality. 

The Art of Hermès, aims to present these likenesses as well as demonstrate how the use of colour and material is paramount to both Hermès’ designs and to the artists in the exhibition. Aside from bovine leather, Hermès bags come in a wide range of different skins, including ostrich, lizard, alligator and crocodile. The different leathers and skins create a distinct look for a bag and, coupled with the highly specialised dying and colouring, allows each bag to have its own unique fingerprint. And, just like Hermès bags, each of the artists in the exhibition approaches their practice in different ways, be-it Warhol and silkscreen, Uecker and nails, and Manzoni and Kaolin.

Within the exhibition each artwork is paired to a bag through its matching palette, illustrating how the application and importance of colour influences each object. One such coupling is that of the So Black Kelly handbag and Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale, 1962; just as the bag has black hardware on glossy black alligator skin, Fontana’s punctured hole into the ebonised black painting is evocative of the absolute.

In Manzoni’s whitewashed Archome, the artist used cotton squares coated in kaolin to create a grid-like pattern that covers the entire canvas surface. The materiality of the kaolin plays elegantly against the white Birkin’s alligator skin.

For both the artworks and the bags, colour and medium function to draw the eye and entice an audience, bringing these pieces to life. By exhibiting these objects side-by-side, The Art of Hermès emphasises parallel attributes between a unique work of art and the exclusivity of a hand-crafted Hermès bag, confirming their status as art objects as well as collectors’ items.

Featured Artists: Christo | Luis Feito | Lucio Fontana | Yayoi Kusama | Piero Manzoni | Chung Sang-Hwa | Pierre Soulages | Günther Uecker | Andy Warhol | Zao Wou-Ki