ROTTERDAM.- In the design gallery
Kunsthal Rotterdam presents the installation Icon Dressed by the Danish-Dutch artist Annette Meyer, a poetic recreation of fourteen silhouettes based on female fashion from the past two centuries. On various mannequins, whose posture, hair-do and make-up further intensify the female image of the specific period, fourteen hand-made paper dresses are presented. The floral motives on the paper are derived from the botanical handbook Flora Danica from1648. All dresses have their own specific cut and show the dress styles for women from the year 1800 up to now: from the French empire dress to the A-line from the sixties and from the Romantic German evening gown from 1830 to the ultra-short skirt from the eighties.
Annette Meyer gets her inspiration in the meeting between consumer society and the human body for her art installations and fashion line. She is internationally acclaimed for her exhibitions of disposable clothing made out of wrapping materials from around the world.
Among her strong, visual concepts are BODYWRAPPInc, RAIN and Flora Danica Dresses, presented in such venues as Spiral Wacoal Art Center in Tokyo, Storefront for Art and Architecture in NY, Charlottenborg in Denmark.
Each project is the result of a close collaboration between artists from diverse disciplines: Industrial designers, architects, video artists, sound composers, musician, textile designers, writers and graphic designers.
Annette Meyer is now in the process of locating business partners to develop these sophisticated and playful works of art into ready-to-wear collections for international distribution.
Annette Meyer was born in Denmark in 1966, educated as a Fashion designer at the Art Academy in Utrecht in Holland and at the Royal Collage of Art in Antwerp in Belgium.
In 1992 she started working for the Danish performance theatre Hotel Pro Forma, designing costumes for eight larger performances, among them 'Enigma of the late afternoon at Carlsberg Glyptoteket, 'OPERAtion Orfeo' shown at The Opera House in Sidney and at BAM in New York as well the performance 'Monkey Business Class', a collaboration with the Japanese performance group Dumb Type and the Architect duo Diller and Scofidio.
In 1995 she moved back to Denmark and had her first solo exhibition at the Museum for art and Crafts where she started making clothing objects out of disposable wrapping materials.
In 1997 Annette Meyer became Head of the Fashion Department at Designskolen Kolding and had her first international solo exhibition in New York in 1998, showing the BODYWRAPPinc.NY collection at StoreFront for Art and Architecture. In 2001 the BODYWRAPPInc. collection continued on show to the design gallery of Kunsthal Rotterdam in Holland, to Kyoto Art Center in Kyoto as well to Spiral Wacoal Art Center in Tokyo, Japan.
Now Annette Meyer is working as a freelance designer with a wide range of activities in the field of design, product development, art managing and teaching, creating innovative concepts and unique ideas.
"I want to create pleasant, sensuous experiences through innovative products and unique ideas. It's the beauty and aesthetic qualities of a product and experience that matters to me", said Annette Meyer.