About the exhibit - SS20
Rute Merk’s exhibit, SS20, is on view at Downs & Ross Gallery in the lower east side, New York, from Jul 08 – Sep 13, 2020.
Rute Merk's renderings of Balenciaga's SS20 runway question how art can influence fashion.
“Her paintings' digital-at-first-glance and nearly holographic portraits of iconic models (which she posits as the highly specified embodiments of real-life corporatized avatars) explore how new visions of humanity and its appearance invoke both a technologized sublime and our concomitant anxieties of its planned obsolescence” (source)
“Informed by Balenciaga creative director Demna Gvasalia’s vision of how the season “reimagines dressing for work," Rute Merk queries how both global fashion and art world fashionability rely on the containment of collective and personal identity within cycles of repetition – seasonally transforming compulsion into production.” (source)
About the Artist - Rute Merk
Rute Merk is a Lithuanian artist who lives and works in Berlin, Germany. She received her BA in Painting from Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2013.
“Merk draws fuzzy lines among genders, anonymous identities, and also the integration of realistic fiction and virtual realities in the facture of her painting which reverberates in its aesthetics of late ’90s RPG video games.” (source)
You can explore her works on her website and Instagram.
