OVERLAND PARK, Kansas — Art and fashion occasionally hook up. It can be serendipity sometimes, especially when a designer’s work enters the realm of sculpture or fabric art. It could even be a “match made in heaven.”
JoAnne Northrup, executive director and chief curator of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, on the campus of Johnson County Community College in the metropolitan Kansas City area, thought so when she conceived A Match Made in Heaven: Katherine Bernhardt x Jeremy Scott.
The concept came about when Northrup wanted to do a collaboration with the college’s fashion merchandising and design department. Jeremy Scott’s name came up at the first meeting; the world famous fashion designer is a hometown hero. But whose art to pair with Scott’s? Fresh in the curator’s mind was Katherine Bernhardt, a fellow Missourian from St. Louis whose studio Northrup had recently visited. When she approached Bernhardt with the proposed two-person show, the painter immediately fell in love with Scott’s designs. “Everything just aligned,” Northrup explained in conversation with Hyperallergic.
A Match Made in Heaven includes nearly 40 large-scale paintings by Bernhardt and more than 500 designs by Scott — 200 of which are sneakers he created for Adidas. The visual cacophony of bright neon colors, kitsch, textures, and pop iconography borders on ocular assault — let maximalism sing out! But somehow this playful combination works brilliantly. When I visited, museum-goers were weaving their way through a maze of Scott’s eclectic mix of outfits and dresses, marveling at all the detail. Some were giggling at the obvious pairing — who can resist an oversized, caramel-colored, prescription bottle-shaped purse placed next to a painting of Xanax pills?
Northrup left much of the show’s layout to the artists; she wanted to promote their shared aesthetics with a certain amount of freedom. Bernhardt’s massive paintings, hung before the garments arrived, fill four galleries, taking up most of the wall space. Her brightly colored, thinned-out acrylics, drips and all, articulate a stream-of-consciousness coupling of seemingly unrelated objects. Cartoonish renderings of a Windex bottle and cigarettes, Cheetos and the Pink Panther, Diet Coke and mushrooms all float in space.
Scott’s zany, over-the-top designs employ pop iconography with a focus on American consumerism, in harmony with Bernhardt’s imagery. Both artists dig into this theme with depictions of junk food: Cheetos, hamburgers, French fries, candy bars. Scott’s droll genius is especially clear in the attention to detail seen in his accessories: a vinyl pizza box is a purse; a mustard squeeze-bottle cap is a hat; lettuce leaves add texture to shoes.
After Bernhardt’s paintings were installed, Scott spent several days in the gallery with her work before showing up with 30 years’ worth of fashion (10 spent helming the luxury label Moschino). Up to three mannequins might cluster around the paintings then spill out into the middle of the galleries. Some of the juxtapositions are straightforward, such as a dress with a Hershey Kiss motif with a painting of the chocolates. Scott’s outrageous hamburger dress, famously worn by Katy Perry at the 2019 Met Gala afterparty, is side by side with Bernhardt’s painting of McDonald’s golden arches. The confection puzzle comes together quite nicely.
The show blends fashion and art effortlessly, as the pairing amplifies the artists’ irreverence and humor; unsurprisingly, Northrup said that the concept came to her intuitively. Katherine Bernhardt and Jeremy Scott are so simpatico that the intertwining of their art feels natural — even divine.
A Match Made in Heaven: Katherine Bernhardt x Jeremy Scott continues at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (12345 College Boulevard, Overland Park, Kansas) through October 26. The exhibition was curated by JoAnne Northrup.
