Being an extremely private person, Martin Margiela has no recognisable facial identity (he and his models were always masked) and he communicates only by fax or email. There is no public face linked to the art 'brand' either, apart from a couple of very early photos. His sculptures, drawings, collages, photography, videos, paintings, conceptual labels, and installations feature subjects other than wearable clothes.
Read MoreHighly fetishistic, the 20 artworks presented at Margiela's 2021 solo exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations have a preoccupation with the surface and textural attributes of the human body. This is seen in the porous skin of BODY PART colour (2019) and BODYPART (2020) and the wavy hair in Hair Portraits (2015–2019), REDHEAD (2019), VANITAS (2019), CARTOGRAPHY (2019), and BUS STOP (2020). Margiela presents not the body clothed, posed, or seen in its entirety—but parts of it. See Torso I-III (2018–2021), LIPSYNC (2020), and RED NAILS (2019).
His practice deals with the normally unnoticed processes of transformation linked to time's impact on surfaces, particularly those associated with abandoned objects with epidermal layers or follicles—and the impact of eventual absence. Some works are descriptive wall labels accompanied by nothing.
