Madeleine Brunnmeier

In her series Gestalten, Madeleine Brunnmeier asked 15 people up to the age of 71 to wear all their clothes at once. Photographing them in what appear to be their own environments, she gives us a glimpse of her models’ personal comfort zones. But these so-called temporary sculptures also suggest clothes as an oxymoron of presence and invisibility – a mode of communication, a representation of status, an archive, a shelter, and a living environment. Clothing serves as both a reflection of the interior and a barrier to the outer world, and Brunnmeier’s work highlights the sensory interplay between people and their apparel. On the one hand, these figures are very specifically personal; on the other, they are open to universal human interpretation, building a collective study of the relationship of the body to clothing, and clothing to the body. 

The word ‘Gestalten’ has numerous meanings in German, representing form and figure but also character. It is descriptive when it comes to structure, but can have negative connotations when referencing personality. Brunnmeier has maintained a form-oriented perspective, in which the sitter/wearer is as important as the clothes; without the body, afterall, clothes lose their function. But by extending the body into these temporary structures, her images also work to reveal clothing as a multiple representation of the person. Born in 1995, Madeleine Brunnmeier is an artist based in Berlin. She studied visual communication at Musashino Art University Tokyo and the University of the Arts Berlin, graduating from the latter in 2023.