German Designer Bernhard Willhelm Brings Groundbreaking Show to MOCA

Sandra Miska

German Designer to Bring Groundbreaking Show to MOCA German Designer Willhelm Finds Freedom In L.A. The worlds of fashion and modern art will collide this month at the MOCA Pacific Design Center with the opening of “When Fashion Shows The Danger Then Fashion Is The Danger Bernhard Willhelm and Jutta Kraus. 3000.” This unique exhibition will be a sculpture installation with a fashion twist.

According to MOCA, Willhelm described the exhibition as “a meditation on the future of commerce and a ‘thinking-forward exhibition.’”  This installation is meant to be his response to “the uniformity of fashion in the 21st century and a forecast of the fashion experience in the 22nd century.”

This original show, Willhelm’s first in an American museum, will incorporate video and photography, as well as displays of memorabilia and other objects from the artist’s personal collection.

A native of Germany, Willhelm broke into the fashion seen over 15 years ago when he began showing in Paris.  He is known as a risk-taker who breaks fashion rules with his ingenious use of color, volume, and themes.

Willhelm put “When Fashion Shows The Danger…” together with his partner Jutta Kraus, with whom he started his fashion label in 1999.  The exhibition will feature the label’s 2015-2016 fall/winter collection.

After living in Belgium and France, Willhelm now calls L.A. home.  Last year, along with Kraus, he uprooted his studio in Paris to Hollywood’s Beachwood Canyon.  Moving across the world to a strange new city (he only visited L.A. once before his relocation) might be stressful for most people, but not Willhelm.

“I have an enormous need for freedom.  I realized that I like being not too comfortable, but rather the opposite,” he told the New York Times.  “I think this choice turned out to be very spontaneous and a bit naïve, too, but it’s always been that way in my life.  Germans make rational decisions and sometimes I decide to do emotional ones.”

“Jutta 3000” opens Feb. 7 and will run through May 17 at the MOCA Pacific Design Center.