Lee Alexander McQueen and Shahpour Pouyan at the Frist Art Museum

From May 24 to August 25, 2024, the Frist Art Museum presents the exhibitions “Lee Alexander McQueen & Ann Ray: Rendez-Vous” and “Shahpour Pouyan: Winter in Paradise”

Source: Frist Art Museum · Image: Frist Center for the Visual Arts. Image by Kathleen Conklin from Falls Church, USA. License Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frist_Center_for_the_Visual_Arts.jpg

Lee Alexander McQueen & Ann Ray: Rendez-Vous

Lee Alexander McQueen (1969–2010) redefined contemporary fashion with his extraordinary ability to blend exquisite craftsmanship with intimate and imaginative storytelling. Mythologized in his own lifetime, he was characterized as a troubled genius and one of the twentieth century’s most visionary designers. Lee Alexander McQueen & Ann Ray: Rendez-Vous offers a rare glimpse into the life and mind of McQueen and introduces one of the twentieth century’s great, but lesser-known, fashion photographers, Ann Ray (b. 1969). With exclusive, unfettered access to McQueen’s world, Ray captured everything from contemplative moments in the design studio to the organized chaos backstage at runway shows. In total, she shot forty-three collections over the course of thirteen years, creating a massive body of work and an indelible record of McQueen’s process.

The exhibition features 65 photographs hand-selected by Ray from her archive of over 32,000 negatives, more than 50 dress objects spanning the entirety of McQueen’s career, 10 gifted garments from Ray’s wardrobe, and various pieces of fashion ephemera, all of which are sourced from one of the world’s largest private collections of McQueen’s works. Both thorough and emotional, the exhibition offers the unique opportunity to reevaluate the life and legacy of a beloved but widely misunderstood figure, and to disentangle the person from the persona.

Shahpour Pouyan: Winter in Paradise

In works of art astonishing for their beauty, sophistication, and virtuosity, Shahpour Pouyan (b. 1979) expresses a poetic melancholy about the human condition. Winter in Paradise will be this internationally renowned Iranian artist’s largest solo museum exhibition to date. Three major projects from the past decade will show Pouyan’s extraordinary mastery of a range of traditional and new media and his engagement with history and contemporary events.

Conceived as a triptych in three galleries, the exhibition explores the architecture of power, its fragmentation and destruction, and feelings of nostalgia for a lost presence. Works on view will include examples of the drawings and ceramic sculptures of architecture for which Pouyan is well known, plus his first virtual reality installation, which is making its debut at the Frist. Accompanied by a haunting musical score set in a chilled room, the VR installation is an immersive multisensory experience that allows guests to explore the interior of an uncharacteristically gloomy Persian mosque in which snow mysteriously falls.