The developing forms of Iris van Herpen

There is an ancient aspiration that runs through the visual arts and natural philosophy: to give form to the non-visible: celestial bodies, biological symmetries, the structures of thought. Iris van Herpen - a Dutch fashion designer, trained in sculpture, dance and fashion design - moves in this same current, where fashion ceases to be a surface and becomes a form of knowledge. The large retrospective Sculpting the Senses, staged at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, is a dense and layered compendium of this project. It is not a celebratory anthology, but a conceptual construction in nine thematic sections - from synesthesia to organic transformation - where over one hundred couture dresses are presented as fragments of a coherent system.

Van Herpen does not design collections, but proposes morphological hypotheses. The clothes are membranes, hulls, exequities of light and geometry that absorb the environment and return it in the form of visual vibrations. They are works that arise from a radical hybridisation, a mix of biology and technology, craftsmanship and 3D printing, oriental calligraphy and comparative anatomy.

Each creation is the product of a thought that extends beyond disciplinary boundaries. In Sculpting the Senses nothing is decorative. The clothes - suspended or in motion - dialogue with video installations, sounds, experimental models, but above all with what cannot be seen: the data collected by neuroscientists, the shapes obtained from micro-organisms or the generative algorithms that support certain geometries. The body, in the artist's vision, is neither object nor measure: it is a place of resonance. And fashion, in this perspective, is neither function nor consumption, but a possible form of thought.

The project finds an ideal home in Rotterdam's Kunsthal. The building, designed by Rem Koolhaas with Fuminori Hoshino between 1988 and 1992, is in itself a conceptual device: without a permanent collection, conceived to house temporary exhibitions, it designs paths with diagonal ramps, industrial transparencies, and oblique corridors that break all hierarchies of space. It is a museum that exhibits not objects, but changing narratives. In this sense, Van Herpen's work - which rejects all fixity - finds in Kunsthal not a frame, but an architectural counterpart.

One of the most eloquent spaces is the Cabinet of Curiosities, which collects sketches, prototypes, biological materials, mineral samples, natural engineering models: the visual vocabulary from which the designer draws form and language. There, it is clear to see that every one of Van Herpen's gestures is rooted in the epistemological tradition of art as a tool for observing reality - from Leonardo to Klee, from Buckminster Fuller to Merce Cunningham's dance.