The Brooklyn Rail

The Austrian Cultural Forum New York’s two-person exhibition, Inspiration Comes from Everyday Life: Works by Elfie Semotan and Nina Hollein, aims to bring together, per the show’s press release, “fashion, photography, [fine] art, and architecture.” Although the show as a whole does do this, such polyvalence is more directly manifested in Semotan’s photography than Hollein’s garments. The subjects and styles Semotan captures range from angular models poised in crisp, commercial-polished scenography to nebulous images of rust-bitten rooms and misty outdoor wilderness scenes reminiscent of F. Holland Day’s Pictorialism. In these latter works, Semotan makes use of restrained chiaroscuro, atmospheric color tones, and soft, bleary focus. Although the photographer is most readily identified with the runway, such images offer viewers a glimpse into her little-appreciated stylistic breadth. Hollein’s work, however, is more closely confined to the world of fashion, and ultimately has little to say about architecture, photography, or the plastic arts.

Hollein’s garments draw from a range of historical textile traditions. The most interesting pieces on view are her 2024 “Colorfield Dresses,” which feature swelling, multi-hued elements that inflate from the wearer’s hip. In their color theory-cued paneling and concave, cape-like outthrusts, these dresses are reminiscent of the designs Sonia Delaunay constructed and sold in her Paris-based “Boutique Simultanée.” A pair of long, pleated ruffle dresses, by contrast, lack this experimental approach to either aesthetics or material. Hung on beams rather than mannequins or live models, Hollein’s dresses fail to strike the viewer as transmogrified artifacts-cum-art-objects. This odd choice of presentation compromises their visual appeal while simultaneously weakening their ability to function as anti-fashion provocations or challenge our categorial assumptions. An upcycled Skirt/Top (2024), constructed from vintage anorak, latex, and plastic, employs a boxed frame, suggesting that Hollein is not necessarily interested in accentuating the body’s contours and form either. Many of her ensembles, then, feel unfinished, showing only the beginnings of a dramatic silhouette that does not ultimately make good on its baroque promise—compare these works, for instance, with those of Rick Owens, who uses soaring shoulder pads and wispy capes to craft cohesive, otherworldly habiliments.

Although she has a penchant for “upcycling,” it is unclear whether Hollein’s work belongs more properly to the history of appropriative deconstruction (e.g., the Antwerp Six and Martin Margiela) or material research and fanciful paneling found in designs by Rei Kawakubo, Junya Watanabe, Hussein Chalayan, or Iris van Herpen. A select few dresses on display, such as a plastic and elastic tulle cinnabar piece fitted with ovular foramen along its torso—the same dress that was used as a costume for Lynn Hershman Leeson’s intermedia installation, Shadow Stalker (2018–21)—indicates Hollein’s interest in the latter tradition. But consider Hollein’s contemporary and Austrian compatriot, Carol Christian Poell, whose collections include object-dyed leathers and acuate suits fitted with prostheses. Creating and exhibiting work outside of the fashion industry’s seasonal cycle, Poell draws on esoteric medical history to inform his investigation of material and silhouette. The results include harrowing, fantastical garments—pieces which, even when presented and not worn, effectively embody the designer’s ideas. Hollein’s designs are not always materially detailed enough to warrant their self-standing presentation and they are not convincing as expressions of conceptual aims either.

Semotan’s photography, however, fares better here. Outside of the fashion industry, she is perhaps best known for collaborations with her late husband, Martin Kippenberger. These include the Théodore Géricault–inspired “The Raft of the Medusa” (1996), where Semotan captures Kippenberger in her studio, the husband aping the various gestures that Gericault had depicted on the raft. In this suite of works, Semotan fixes Gericault’s dramatic poses in austere black-and-white prints. Semotan’s restrained, middle-gray portraits of Willem Dafoe, Sylvie Liska, and Vanessa Beecroft—all of which are on view in this exhibition—similarly demonstrate Semotan’s facility as a sober genre photographer with a proclivity for the stern and formal. Also included here are Semotan’s late-career exercises in capturing barren and fabric-bisected outdoor spaces (e.g., Untitled, (Division Street) [2008]; Untitled (Still Life) [2017]). These may at first appear utterly unrelated to the other works on view, but they demonstrate a similarly formalist interest in how the material affordances of a photographic subject pictorially affect its environmental semblance.

Semotan’s atmospheric works also attest to interests that extend far beyond commercial pomp. The artist returns again and again to the leitmotif of membranous fabric, gauze-like among bare trees and cold parking garage security grilles. It drapes and webs these structures, occasional perforations allowing for light’s passage. In a 2017 work photographed in Burgenland, Untitled (Still Life), an array of arboreal shadows dance across a lustrous, silver fabric that is folded into itself. In works like this, Semotan’s camera suppresses transitional tones. Her frontally-illuminated, fabric-swathed objects often betray shadows driven to the edges. Using fabric where the Victorian photographer Henry Peach Robinson used hired actors, Semotan spotlights the way fabric pulls its bordering structures into a webbed dance, effectively directing a drama of still objects. Although this two-person exhibition’s clearest unifying theme is fashion, such works are worlds apart from “fashion photography” as we typically understand it.