The celebrated fashion designer Iris van Herpen combines centuries-old craftsmanship with cutting-edge technology to create awe-inspiring couture. In 2011, at just 27 years old, the Dutch designer received an invitation to join the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, the French regulating commission that determines if a fashion house is eligible to be a Haute Couture “maison.”
In the 15 years since, van Herpen has consistently pushed the bounds of what wearable art can be. She has experimented with 3D-printed garments and produced a “living” dress that, thanks to 125 million bioluminescent algae, emits light when it moves.
Van Herpen’s pieces are so inventive, in fact, that art and design museums have clamored to show them. In 2023, the couturier opened the first dedicated exhibition of her work at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Titled “Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses,” the show offered a glimpse into the designer’s inspirations, which range from architecture to the deep sea and the cosmos.
The exhibition was a veritable cabinet of curiosities, chock full of natural specimens and works by contemporary artists and makers. These pieces, alongside van Herpen’s own avant-garde designs, conveyed her reverence for science, experimentation, and innovation. After traveling the globe, “Sculpting the Senses” has made its American debut. It opened earlier this month at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City, which is staging the largest iteration of the show thus far.
Channeling van Herpen’s interdisciplinary vision, we’ve selected 10 artists who evoke various aspects of her distinctive point of view. Some share her interest in cultivating symbiotic relationships between living and non-living forms. Others similarly focus on the intricate structures and movements of the natural world. Working in painting, sculpture, and installation, certain artists count themselves among van Herpen’s inspiring trove of collaborators, while others poetically reflect the couturier’s signature play with perception and light.
Anicka Yi
B. 1971, Seoul. Lives and works in New York City.
Vinegar Fissure, 2024
Anicka Yi
Esther Schipper
Post Classical V, 2025
Anicka Yi
Esther Schipper
Scientific research is at the core of Anicka Yi’s practice. Like van Herpen, the artist grapples with the boundaries between nature and the synthetic. Yi has said: “I seek to expand the possibilities of how we perceive ourselves and our place within the broader ecological framework….Through this lens, my art becomes a space for contemplating not only what was, but what could be, in the ongoing narrative of life on Earth.”
Yi treats her studio like a laboratory, collaborating with scientists and other specialists to bring her unorthodox visions to life. She has worked with volatile materials including yeast, fungi, bacteria, ants, and snails to make her installations, sculptures, and paintings.
This May at Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley, Yi opened her first large-scale outdoor project, “Anicka Yi: Message from the Mud.” It offers a microbiological portrait of the landscape, with diverse colonies of algae, cyanobacteria, and microbes responding to sunlight and time.
Tara Donovan
B. 1969, New York City. Lives and works in New York City.
Untitled, 2017
Tara Donovan
Krakow Witkin Gallery
Stratagem IX, 2024
Tara Donovan
Pace Gallery
Tara Donovan is known for large-scale, often site-specific installations that transform accumulations of everyday objects (toothpicks, straws, CDs, etc.) into formidable sculptures. Like van Herpen, she privileges optical effects and intriguing surfaces, as well as forms that seem to have grown organically.
Given the clear visual parallels, it’s no surprise van Herpen selected Untitled (2009), a mylar and hot-glue sculpture by Donovan for the Brooklyn Museum exhibition. The sculpture, which evokes crystalline structures and unfamiliar vegetal forms, appears alongside van Herpen’s 2017 Aeriform dress: a gravity-defying, waterjet-cut, stainless-steel-and-tulle design, made with her longtime collaborator, the artist Philip Beesley.
Tomás Saraceno
B. 1973, Tucuman, Argentina. Lives and works in Berlin.
Stratus nebulosus niveus/M+I,, 2024
Tomás Saraceno
Galería RGR
Central to Tomás Saraceno’s practice is an abiding fascination with spiders. The artist’s floating sculptures and interactive installations harness impressive technological developments—for example, the first 3D-mapping technology for spider webs—as well as web sonification and signaling devices that reveal how spiders communicate through vibrational signals.
Saraceno shares a technological approach and reverence for the environment, as well as a love of spiders, with van Herpen. Her Brooklyn Museum exhibition includes a work by ECOLOGICSTUDIO (an architecture and design firm specializing in biotechnology for the built environment) that demonstrates how tarantulas’ webs change when responding to different 3D-printed environments.
Cindy Ji Hye Kim
B. 1990, Incheon, South Korea. Lives and works in New York City.
Days of Heaven, 2024
Cindy Ji Hye Kim
Casey Kaplan
The Sower and the Plough, Midnight, 2025
Cindy Ji Hye Kim
Casey Kaplan
Cindy Ji Hye Kim’s uncanny paintings feature unusual supports and a unique mélange of influences: scaffolding, medieval torture, and Korean folk arts, to name a few. The artist paints on translucent silk, which reveals the silhouettes of her intricately carved stretchers beneath. The layered effect creates a spectral quality reminiscent of van Herpen’s garments, which emit movement even when off the body. Both creators also use skeleton imagery, explore the passage of time, and incorporate architectural structures into their work. These elements enhance a sense of both literal and psychological depth.
Eva Jospin
B. 1975, Paris. Lives and works in Paris.
Niche colonnes, 2025
Eva Jospin
Suzanne Tarasieve
Bois Noir, 2025
Eva Jospin
GALLERIA CONTINUA
Eva Jospin and van Herpen both engage elements of architecture as they convey the magic of what the human hand can craft. Jospin works across media, though she’s perhaps best known for her meticulous sculptures: She carves into numerous layers of cardboard, transforming the utilitarian material into something fantastical. The artist further adorns these forms with threads, shells, and rocks, making them as charming as they are bewildering. Jospin often collaborates with the artisans of the Chanakya workshop and the Chanakya School of Craft in Mumbai, who use hundreds of shades of threads to turn Jospin’s drawings into enchanting embroideries.
Rogan Brown
B. 1966, London. Lives and works in Nîmes, France.
Ghost Coral Colour Variation, 2022
Rogan Brown
C Fine Art
Magic Circle, 2016
Rogan Brown
C Fine Art
Rogan Brown is among the van Herpen collaborators featured in “Sculpting the Senses.” The British sculptor takes inspiration from microscopic imagery, hand- and laser-cutting paper into mesmerizing works. Like van Herpen, Brown is awed by all that’s hidden from the human eye. As he describes on his website: “The act of cutting becomes a metaphor for revelation: a dissection of perception itself. A recurring theme in my work is the inherent tension between science’s drive to categorize and contain, and nature’s overwhelming complexity.”
For van Herpen’s 2021 “Earthrise” collection, the couturier partnered with Brown on a series of dresses constructed from layers of laser-cut Parley Ocean Plastic, which is upcycled from plastic found on beaches and in the ocean. The material evokes the intricacies of lace, in line with Brown’s kaleidoscopic paper-sculpture creations.
Keysook Geum
B. 1955, South Korea. Lives and works in Seoul.
Red Durumage , 2025
Keysook Geum
Callan Contemporary
Artist, designer, and educator Keysook Geum is the daughter of two ballet dancers. Like van Herpen, who also trained in classical ballet, her work is permeated by a sense of choreography and movement. Geum herself trained in textiles and fashion design. She now constructs twisted-wire and crystal sculptures that appear like weightless garments that are constantly in motion. The silhouettes pay homage to both haute couture and traditional Korean clothing. Additionally, they refer back to the threaded flower arrangements that Geum made as a child. The interaction of light and shadow in her pieces recalls van Herpen’s own ethereal gowns.
Gala Porras-Kim
B. 1984, Bogotá. Lives and works in Los Angeles and London.
1 Vitrine with 70 Religious Figures and Artefacts at Pitt Rivers Museum, 2025
Gala Porras-Kim
Sprüth Magers
Gala Porras-Kim is an interdisciplinary artist whose research-based practice focuses on the relationship between cultural artifacts and the conventions that govern their collection, conservation, display, and taxonomy. She is interested in how objects shape our understanding of history and has produced a long-running series of drawings of art and objects displayed on shelves.
On the surface, these detailed drawings resemble diverse cabinets of curiosities, conjuring the many disciplines that inspire van Herpen (a section in the exhibition is deliberately staged as a cabinet of curiosities). However, Porras-Kim and van Herpen share deeper connections in the way they engage the natural world. In the 2024 exhibition “A Hand in Nature” at the MCA Denver, Porras-Kim imagined how artworks would evolve if natural forces were granted creative agency.
Anne von Freyburg
B. 1979, Velp, Netherlands. Lives and works in London.
In Flight Mode (After Fragonard, The Swing), 2026
Anne von Freyburg
K Contemporary
Bubblelicious, 2020
Anne von Freyburg
K Contemporary
Like van Herpen, Anne von Freyburg studied fashion design at ArtEZ University of the Arts in the Netherlands. Despite her professional turn to fine art, a strong sense of dress remains in her practice. The artist paints with textiles, creating complex and dynamic images in patchworks of colorful fabrics.
Also like van Herpen, von Freyburg’s process combines technology with hand-stitching — she uses Photoshop to digitally manipulate images of Old Master paintings, abstracting them into dreamlike and psychedelic compositions that alter everything except what makes the original painting iconic: a subject’s facial expression, for example, or a work’s distinctive color palette. The creations of von Freyburg and van Herpen benefit from slow looking, which allows viewers to unpack their endless details.
Studio DRIFT
Established 2007. Based in Amsterdam.
Fragile Future FFC 3.8 Small Diamond, 2012
DRIFT
Carpenters Workshop Gallery
Fragile Future FF 3.17, 2021
DRIFT
Carpenters Workshop Gallery
Dutch artists Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta founded Studio DRIFT in 2007. The pair are known for their experiential sculptures, kinetic installations, and performances. Whether it’s their mechanized, “dancing” “Shylight” sculptures, which gracefully open and close as they move up and down, or their “Fragile Future” sculptures that combine dandelion seeds with LED lights into various geometric structures, Studio DRIFT bridges nature and technology in spellbinding ways.
Van Herpen collaborated with Studio DRIFT for her “Syntopia” fall/winter 2018 collection scenography, for which Studio DRIFT produced a large kinetic installation suspended above the runway. As models graced the catwalk, 20 glass wings, representing various steps of flying, hypnotically echoed their movements.
