Helmut Lang’s first solo institutional exhibition in Los Angeles, What Remains Behind, at MAK Center for Art and Architecture at Schindler House, consists of ten freestanding sculptures and two hanging pieces. Curated by Neville Wakefield and on view until 4 May, 2025, Lang’s bodily works cut abstract figures in an industrial, wood-panelled, modernist space.

In 1986, the Austrian designer founded his namesake fashion house. Distinctive minimalism and modern utility were hallmarks of the label, quickly cementing Lang as a fashion fixture. In 2004, after much cultural and financial success, he sold his shares in the company to Prada, and mere months later, in 2005, he walked away from fashion entirely. Not lost to the creative sector, he retreated to Long Island and threw himself into full-time fine art making.

While Lang’s fashion designs were pared back, balletic and rather severe, his sculptures are meaty, sinewy and thrumming with sensuality. Found materials—wax, rubber, steel, mattress foam and latex—are contorted by tendon-like bindings and then hardened in an experimental, deconstructivist and form-heavy tendency. Lang, who has been exhibiting in Europe and the United States since 1996, has presented a series of works where the familiar is made alien with ghostly memories of furniture speaking to material histories.

Some of the works sport names like fist and prolapse. There’s an intentional and dark sexual overtone to the sculptures in all their cured and glazed fleshiness. There’s also a penetrative power to the fists, thrusting upward into the sparse interior of Schindler House, readable as phallic and carnal. In conversation with the prolapse works, which burst in their tiredness and drooped figure, locate themselves as sacral, belonging to the dirty realm of waste and pleasure.

Lang’s work is mysterious for its disturbing, grotesque beauty. It’s sticky (looking) stuff they’re made of.

Helmut Lang: What remains behind continues until 4 May, 2025, at MAK Center for Art and Architecture at Schindler House