GRONINGEN.- The Groninger Museum is presenting the first major solo exhibition of the work of fashion designer Marga Weimans (Rotterdam, 1970), who is one of the most striking designers of this moment. The Groninger Museum has been following Weimans since her graduation. In this way, the Museum has systematically acquired items for its collection, while her work has been regularly displayed in smaller presentations. This exhibition is an overview of early, recent and new work.

As the first Dutch artist to do so, Marga Weimans graduated from the prestigious fashion course at the Royal Academy for Fine Art in Antwerp in 2005. She attracted a great deal of attention with her graduation collection, simultaneously winning the i-D Styling Award which was then being conferred for the very first time. Last year she showed her characteristic designs in several museums and on the catwalk of the Amsterdam Fashion Week.

The exhibition displays work from collections such Debut (2006) and Wonderland (2009), among others. Debut covers the theme of vistas, where the voluminous black dresses are introduced as a kind of mountain landscape. Wonderland was inspired by the contrast between dream and reality.

Themes and symbols
In her work, Weimans investigates diverse themes that are often related to identity, technology and beauty. She translates these in an ingenious way into extraordinary outfits that are a combination of pure handcraft and high-tech. Characteristic features of her signature are the richly contrasting graphic patterns by means of which she refers to her Surinamese background.

The thought of her own fashion house forms another important basis for Weimans’s ideas. To her, this represents more than merely a symbol of her dreams and ambitions. The fashion house runs as a leitmotiv through Weimans’s work and forms a framework from which all ideas emerge and where all previous collections, ambitions, experiments, as well as the classic items of the future, will be allocated their own niche. In a similar vein, the Body Archive represents the idea of archives. The coloured plexiglas cubes, which are part of the outfits, are symbols of Weimans’s DNA which she had partially sequenced and converted into a colour pattern for this collection.

Collaboration OMA*AMO
OMA*AMO collaborates with fashion designer Marga Weimans on the central installation of her solo exhibition. With this project OMA*AMO continues its long standing investigation in the processes of fashion, for the first time in strict dialogue with a highly experimental designer. The installation will challenge the limits between space and fashion in the form of an ambiguous hybrid, floating between a wearable space and an inhabitable dress.