grazerkunstverein

(Exhibition)

Eyes

Inge Grognard

29/03 - 24/04/2025, opening 28/03, 18:00

Eyes is an exhibition featuring seven large-scale billboards across the city of Graz, each presenting a composition of eye makeup by Inge Grognard, a pioneering Belgian makeup artist whose work has shaped avant-garde fashion for decades. Captured by Grognard herself backstage during runway preparations and fashion shoots, these images focus exclusively on the eye, omitting all other defining elements such as clothing, hair, scenography, and accessories. This approach highlights the eye as an isolated subject, emphasizing it as a site of composition, color, and texture, while retaining its capacity to convey emotion and depth. Through enlargement and repetition across the city, the exhibition shifts attention to such details that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Makeup has a long history as both adornment and self-expression, embedded in daily rituals yet constantly evolving as a form of creative and cultural practice. By isolating the eye, Eyes highlights this tension between routine and abstraction; displaced from their original context, the images draw attention to makeup as an independent visual language rather than a supporting element within a larger aesthetic context.

Grognard is known for her raw, unconventional approach to makeup, often exploring distortion, asymmetry, and non-traditional materials. Eyes highlights these motifs by transferring them within the wider urban environment, inviting passersby to engage with makeup not as mere embellishment, but as a potent act of composition – one that reclaims it as a site of agency and unruliness.

This project builds upon a concept initially developed by Julie Peeters for 019 in Ghent in 2023. The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication featuring photographs by Inge Grognard documenting her makeup work. It is edited by Tom Engels and Julie Peeters and published by Grazer Kunstverein.

INGE GROGNARD (b. 1958) is a pioneering Belgian makeup artist whose work has shaped avant-garde fashion for decades. As a teenager, she befriended Martin Margiela—an encounter that shaped both their creative paths, leading to a two-decade collaboration that helped define the raw, deconstructed aesthetic of Maison Martin Margiela. In the mid-1980s, Grognard became an integral force within the Antwerp Six, working closely with Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Bikkembergs, Dirk Van Saene, and Marina Yee. Her unconventional approach to beauty—gritty, surreal, and often unsettling—became a hallmark of Belgian fashion’s radical identity. Grognard has continuously challenged conventional beauty standards, rejecting polished perfection in favor of rawness, imperfection, and subversion. Her work often emphasizes distortion, asymmetry, and unconventional materials, pushing the boundaries of what is traditionally considered beautiful. Beyond the Antwerp Six, Grognard continued to shape the next wave of designers emerging from Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts Fashion Department, including Raf Simons, Veronique Branquinho, Haider Ackermann, A.F. Vandevorst, Bernhard Willhelm, Christian Wijnants, Demna Gvasalia, and Glenn Martens. Her work extends across some of the most groundbreaking houses in fashion, from Balenciaga and Rick Owens to Vetements, Y/Project, Eckhaus Latta, and Jean Paul Gaultier. Throughout her career, she has collaborated closely with her lifelong partner, photographer Ronald Stoops.

01Photo: Inge Grognard. Courtesy of the artist.