Il mito della moda

The Luciana Matalon Foundation in Milan presents from October 2 to 15, 2025 the solo exhibition by Dimitrije Popović entitled “Il mito della moda”. An exhibition project gathering over 50 works—paintings, drawings, and installations—including an impressive triptych conceived as the narrative and symbolic fulcrum of the whole journey. The opening, scheduled for Thursday, October 2, will give the public the opportunity to meet an artist who for decades has investigated the great themes of the Western imagination, combining painting and writing, critical reflection and visual invention, in a language that traverses art history, literature, religion, and contemporary myths.

Dimitrije Popović, born in Cetinje, Montenegro, in 1951, trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he obtained his diploma in 1976. His artistic trajectory intertwines with that of some protagonists of Surrealism and visionary painting in the twentieth century: during his stay in Paris he came into contact with Dado Đurić, Salvador Dalí, Ernst Fuchs, and Leonor Fini, taking part in exhibitions alongside these masters. In 1982 he was present in Milan at the great Jubilee of Leonardo with the series Omaggio a Leonardo, and in subsequent years he exhibited in prominent contexts, from the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto to the Pantheon in Rome, up to UNESCO in Paris. International prizes and recognitions have marked a path that today includes more than three hundred group exhibitions and numerous solo shows, supplemented by essays, critical volumes, and works of narrative. His research has repeatedly been recognized as among the most original in the European panorama, capable of uniting intellectual rigor with imaginative force.

With “Il mito della moda” the artist proposes a reflection on the very essence of dressing and image-making. It is not a superficial tribute to elegance or beauty, but an investigation into the mechanism by which fashion continuously dies and is reborn, killing itself in order to keep living. From the fig leaf that marks the origins of representation to contemporary technological materials, fashion never ceases to generate symbols, to renew codes, to create desires. In this process the body—especially the female body—becomes a privileged medium: it displays garments and at the same time shows itself, becoming an icon of glamour that borders on the limits of the real. In Popović’s works, slender models and refined figures are transformed into true living sculptures, into images that combine fascination and eroticism with an almost ritual rigor, as if beauty were disciplined and at the same time celebrated.

The monumental triptych presented at the Matalon Foundation concentrates in itself the tensions and suggestions of the entire cycle. Monumental in size and visual impact, it becomes a secular altar upon which are represented together elegance and disquiet, grace and transience, in a play of contrasts evoking both the great Renaissance altarpieces and contemporary theatrical scenography. Its presence dominates the exhibition path and invites considering fashion as an aesthetic language but also as a tool for building collective myth. The exhibition is structured as a journey through images that evoke desire, status, and belonging, but also fragility and precariousness. Fashion, Popović suggests, is not only an ornament or an economic mechanism, but a cultural device that shapes identity and social relations. It tells us who we are and who we would like to be, reveals our aspirations but also our fears, and for this reason it assumes a mythical dimension. In the age of social media and constant exposure of the self, the artist’s reflection appears more timely than ever: every garment becomes a declaration, every aesthetic choice a narrative gesture, every image a fragment of personal and collective myth. Visiting “Il mito della moda” thus means confronting a vision that intertwines aesthetics and critique, beauty and unease. The more than fifty works on display portray fashion as a total phenomenon, one that unites eros and discipline, seduction and fetishism, fascination and transience, and that offers itself as a metaphor for the human condition, perpetually suspended between the desire for eternity and the awareness of fragility. The exhibition at the Luciana Matalon Foundation represents a landmark event for Milan, international capital of fashion, and for the public who will have the opportunity to immerse themselves in the visionary universe of an artist who has always questioned the relationship between image and myth. The show will be open to the public from October 2 to 15, 2025 at the Luciana Matalon Foundation in Milan.