In her downtown Los Angeles studio, Kelly Reemsten maintains a curated archive of the sartorial. Racks of Dior, Carolina Herrera, and Yves Saint Laurent stand as both artifacts and muses. These garments, known for their classic silhouettes and architectural presence, have long served as the central subjects of Reemsten's oil paintings — works that frequently juxtapose the refined elegance of high fashion with a subtle, subversive weight. Her latest body of work, "Fool's Gold," currently on view at Albertz Benda in Los Angeles, shifts the artist's focus toward the metallic. Comprising a suite of new oil paintings and hand-embellished screenprints, the collection is a dedicated study in gold lamé and sequins.
The shift is more than a change in palette. Reemsten describes the exhibition as an exploration of reflection — capturing the complex way light interacts with synthetic and metallic textures, translating the ephemeral shimmer of a runway moment into the permanence of heavy pigment. The title itself signals a productive tension: "fool's gold" is pyrite, a mineral that mimics value without possessing it. Applied to fashion, the phrase opens a line of inquiry into what surface brilliance conceals, promises, or replaces.
The Garment as Design Object
Reemsten's practice belongs to a lineage of painters who treat clothing not as incidental detail but as primary subject. Where seventeenth-century Dutch masters rendered silk and lace to signal social standing, and where more recent painters like John Currin or Lisa Yuskavage have used fashion as a vehicle for irony or provocation, Reemsten's approach is notably more archival. Her studio houses a growing collection of high-fashion pieces — including recent additions from designers like Molly Goddard — which she treats as a living library. Each garment is studied for its material properties before it becomes a painting: the way a sequin catches directional light, the manner in which lamé folds and creases, the difference between a matte gold and a reflective one.
This archival impulse ensures that every texture, from the sheer volume of a contemporary silhouette to the intricate beadwork of a vintage gown, is rendered with precise, tactile fidelity. The result is oil painting that functions almost as material documentation — a record of how fashion design solves problems of light, structure, and movement. In "Fool's Gold," the surface brilliance of the clothing becomes a lens through which to view the intersection of luxury, identity, and the discipline of the archive.
The choice to work in oil is itself significant. Oil paint, with its slow drying time and capacity for layered glazing, is one of the few media capable of replicating the optical complexity of metallic fabric. Reemsten's canvases do not merely depict gold; they reconstruct the behavior of gold on a surface, building luminosity through successive layers of pigment in a process that mirrors the labor embedded in the garments themselves.
Surface, Value, and What Lies Between
The broader cultural moment gives "Fool's Gold" additional resonance. Fashion and fine art have drawn closer over the past decade, with major museums staging retrospectives of designers and auction houses treating couture as collectible. Yet the relationship remains uneasy. Fashion is cyclical, commercial, and designed for the body in motion; painting is singular, market-resistant in aspiration if not always in practice, and made for the wall. Reemsten's work sits precisely at this fault line, borrowing fashion's visual language while subjecting it to painting's slower, more deliberate mode of attention.
The inclusion of hand-embellished screenprints alongside the oil paintings adds another layer. Screenprinting carries its own art-historical weight — most obviously through Warhol, whose serial production questioned the boundary between fine art and commodity. By embellishing these prints by hand, Reemsten reverses the logic: she reintroduces the singular gesture into a reproducible medium, just as her paintings extract permanence from the disposable glamour of a fashion season.
What remains open is whether the exhibition frames surface as deception or as a legitimate form of meaning. The title suggests skepticism — fool's gold, after all, disappoints on closer inspection. But the paintings themselves do not mock their subjects. They lavish attention on them. The tension between the two readings is, perhaps, the point: an invitation to consider whether the luster of a thing and the substance of a thing are as separable as the idiom implies.
With reporting from Cool Hunting.
Source · Cool Hunting
