Vivian Maier
Akris x Vivian Maier
MAY 17 – 20, 2017
Fashion and Photography: Five-Day Exhibition of Vivian Maier’s Photographs Celebrates Akris Pre-Fall Collection’s Homage to Maier
NEW YORK – Howard Greenberg Gallery will present an exhibition of more than 30 photographs by Vivian Maier from May 16-20, 2017. The five-day exhibition is in conjunction with the debut of the Akris Pre-Fall 2017 collection, which was designed as an homage to Maier. Akris Creative Director, Albert Kriemler, was inspired by the photographer, who remained unknown during her lifetime. The Akris designs include pieces with a slightly tongue-in-cheek, trompe l’oeil effect that refer to the photographer’s self-portraits and cameras. The collection will be available concurrently in store at Bergdorf Goodman and online at BG.com, and will be seen in the store’s interior and Fifth Avenue window.
The story of Vivian Maier (1926-2009) has practically become a photography legend: Maier’s previously unknown body of work came to light when it was purchased from an auction in Chicago in 2007. Born in New York City, Maier spent some of her youth in France and then worked in Chicago as a nanny and caregiver for most of her life. In her leisure, however, Maier ventured into the art of photography. Consistently taking photographs over the course of five decades, she would ultimately leave behind over 100,000 negatives. While her photographs have compelled viewers around the world since being brought to the public eye, there is much that remains unknown about the enigmatic woman behind the lens.
The exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery presents Vivian Maier’s street photography from 1950 through 1978. Maier took “self-portraits” of her shadows, one on a New York City walkway with her tote bag, revealing with an issue of Time magazine inside, and another – which inspired one of Akris’s fabrics – shows her shadow looming over bright green grass dotted with buttercups from 1975. She also shot her reflection in store windows, sometimes obscuring her face with her camera. Maier was intensely curious about people on the street and her portraits on view range from a 1954 image of the singer, actress and civil rights activist Lena Horne to a man precariously perched on the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building in New York.
About Akris
Akris is an international fashion house founded in 1922 in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Creative director Albert Kriemler designs sleek and effortless collections for a discerning global clientele of women and signature accessories including the Ai bag made of coveted Mongolian horsehair. The Swiss fashion house is renowned for its rarefied and innovative double-face, for pushing the boundaries of St. Gallen guipure embroidery and pioneering digital photo printing techniques. Since 2004, Albert Kriemler shows his collections at Paris Fashion Week. Akris has subsidiaries in Japan, the US, China and Korea and operates its own boutiques in major cities around the globe. The collections are also available in over 300 selected points of distribution worldwide.