Bárbara Sánchez-Kane Transforms Fashion into Avant-Garde Art

The Mexican artist Bárbara Sánchez-Kane started out as a fashion designer—albeit a highly unconventional one. Her gender-bending collections, shown at New York, Los Angeles, and Mexico City fashion weeks over the past decade, questioned the very nature of luxury consumption: They were assembled from unexpected materials (think stilettos with toy metal shopping carts for heels) and incorporated sly architectural details (suit jackets featuring seductive cutouts, jeans with plunging pockets meant for carrying flowers). Then, in 2019, Sánchez-Kane had a chance encounter with the British sculptor Sarah Lucas, who introduced her to José Kuri and Mónica Manzutto, the power couple behind the Mexican gallery Kurimanzutto. Since then, the 37-year-old punk provocateur has been ascending to the highest climes of the international art scene.

Her Prêt-à-Patria sculpture—a human centipede of life-size mannequins dressed in Mexican military uniforms and impaled on a flagpole—literally skewered the tenets of toxic nationalism during a pandemic-timed show at Kurimanzutto. The work was reinstalled at the 2024 Venice Biennale, where Sánchez-Kane enlisted male performers to wear the same attire—accessorized with oversize phallic caps—at the exhibition venue.

Sánchez-Kane has made her obsession with clothing a central part of her artistic practice. She still maintains her own label, and her 2022 solo debut at Kurimanzutto in Mexico City was a runway show featuring opera singers, drones, and wrestler characters wearing ensembles that played with ideas of “Mexicanness.” Last year, in the gallery’s New York outpost, she showed sculptures made from tapestries woven from leather belts, and a desk draped with a mountain of animal skins.

For this portfolio, shot with her friend the Argentinian photographer Sofia Alazraki, Sánchez-Kane wanted to celebrate Kurimanzutto’s 25th anniversary by honoring some of the organic familial relationships she’s formed with other artists in the gallery’s roster. She created uncanny assemblages that allude to their work, using as props designer garments of her choosing.

In one image, a model wears a Sánchez-Kane baseball cap that peeks out from under a Balenciaga hooded jacket. His right shoulder is straddled by a pair of 3D-printed legs attached to a paint bucket; a landscape by the Mexican artist Minerva Cuevas, which was dipped in chapopote, a tarlike substance, hangs on the wall behind him. The vignette, says Sánchez-Kane, is about “the tip of the iceberg of a postapocalyptic future.” In what might be the most personal arrangement, she references Sarah Lucas’s well-known pantyhose sculptures, but adds a pair of red Jimmy Choo heels.

“I’ve never left fashion; it’s the core of my work,” says Sánchez-Kane. “It’s just that the access and the speed of it didn’t work for me. I like the possibilities of exploration.” Her very first sculptures, after all, were made from the heels of old shoes. “We can be objects sometimes—we’ve now got plastic in our bodies—so for Sofia and me, using this composition of art and fashion, activating these objects, was exciting. My job was just putting them together in an orgy.”

Photographed by Sofia Alazraki. Makeup by Luisiana López. Models: Oliver Chávez, Joseph Viamontes, and Diego Celarain at Ese Chico Casting. Featured artworks courtesy of the artists and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York.

Communications and Media Director, Kurimanzutto: Julia Villaseñor; Produced by Momoroom; Head of Production: Monse Castera; Production Coordinator: Ana Portugal; Photography assistant: Alexis Rayas; Fashion assistants: Mercedes García Montes, Víctor Miguel Moreno López; Production assistant: Alejandro Marcial; Facility manager: Eduardo Bolivar.