‘Nothing Is Permanent’: Helmut Lang on His New Sculptures

‘Whatever I am now is the result of past life experiences,’ the artist and former fashion designer Helmut Lang told me recently. We were discussing his forthcoming exhibition of sculptures, his development as an artist and his ongoing fascination with diametric opposites: muscle and sinew, tension and release, strength and fragility, construction and decay. 

Lang is known for his eponymous brand that revolutionized the fashion industry in the late 1980s and early ’90s with its precision, raw-edged tailoring and subversive use of industrial materials. In 2005, he walked away from fashion but did not leave his core obsessions behind. Lang’s shift to becoming an artist was not a departure so much as an evolution of his creative practice. Sculpture offers him the opportunity to explore on a deeper level the concerns that preoccupied him as a designer: memory, materiality, the body and the interplay between construction and deconstruction. 

‘At its best, art always raises more questions. It is not simple and one; it is complex and many,’ Lang explained. His current exhibition, ‘What remains behind’, takes place across five rooms of the Schindler House in Los Angeles – a modernist landmark designed by fellow Austrian émigré Rudolph Schindler in 1921 – now home to the MAK Center for Art and Architecture. Lang has transformed furniture, latex, mattress foam, resin, shellac and steel into 10 freestanding sculptures and two hanging pieces that seem to hold both memory and motion. 

Works from the series ‘fist (I–VI)’ (2015–17) all take the form of human fists thrusting upward, charged with energy; others, such as prolapse I (2024), are bulbous, keeled-over structures, their weight pressing downward in an almost visceral collapse. While kleine Portrait Arbeit I (2015–17) is a tile-like hanging relief, evoking the imprint of something once present. 

Neither ruins nor relics, Lang’s sculptures are new artifacts of an ever-evolving process.

The Schindler House itself embodies the qualities towards which Lang has always gravitated: rawness and an openness to transformation. ‘The object and its integrity are the most important,’ Lang told me. ‘Context and placement can be vital if you must respond to a certain environment, or if the space around the work becomes part of it. On the other hand, I am also willing to let a space violate the sculptures and avoid the trap of beautifying the object.’ 

‘They have a chimeric quality to them,’ Lang explained when I asked whether his works were intended to represent human bodies. ‘They can assume a defined undefined expression in zoomed views or imaginary parts of the surfaces, but it is their inner tension and agency which decides the final form.’ Neither ruins nor relics, Lang’s sculptures are new artifacts of an ever-evolving process. ‘Like emotions, they are fugitive, restless and refuse to settle into singular meanings,’ he noted. ‘Shapeshifting in character as much as form, depending on where one stands, they can appear mordant, lugubrious, tragic and even comic.’

I asked Lang what draws him to use materials with a history or presence. ‘The reversal of logic and appearance, experimenting with surface and assemblage, enabling a possible conversation with memories of different human conditions. In addition to my own multi-layered, broad, unconscious or conscious thoughts – [I aim] to find inner peace for a moment, when the work is strong enough to fight me back.’

This act of transformation – breaking down and reconstituting – reflects Lang’s unique approach to producing clothes. His Fall/Winter 2003 ready-to-wear collection contained harnesses, straps and sculptural outerwear that reshaped the body’s natural contours. His garments, such as the 1994 rubber and lace dress, wrapped around the body, sometimes constraining it, sometimes liberating it. His sculptures likewise evoke an undeniable physicality. After leaving fashion, Lang reportedly destroyed much of his archive, shredding garments and using the remnants as raw material for his sculptures. ‘Nothing is permanent,’ he told me. ‘[...] but all past time enables the language for now and beyond. Somehow, losing some illusions allows others to be acquired.’ 

Lang has not left behind the ideas he cultivated during his fashion career. He has changed his medium, but the questions remain the same: What does it mean to inhabit space? How do materials carry history? How does form shape identity? His sculptures’ fleshy, indeterminate edges suggest an identity in flux. They haunt the Schindler House like ghostly entities, lingering as traces of the past. In ‘What remains behind’, Lang prompts us to consider not only what endures in the wake of an experience but how our legacy shapes that which is yet to come. 

Helmut Lang’s ‘What remains behind‘ is curated by Neville Wakefield and open at the MAK Center at the Schindler House, Los Angeles, until 4 May

^{Main image: Helmut Lang, fist I and fist IV, 2015–17. © Courtesy: the artist and the MAK Centre for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles.}