Helmut Lang has long been a conjurer of material. In his fashion heyday, he pulled fabrics into stark, geometric silhouettes, wielding industrial elements like rubber and metallics with the precision of a sculptor. That instinct didn’t fade when he abandoned the runway in 2005. Instead, it hardened into something elemental—something sculptural.

Now, at Schindler House in Los Angeles, Lang’s latest exhibition, What remains behind, places his enigmatic sculptures within the rigid modernist architecture of Rudolf Schindler. The result? A visceral dialogue between space and object, presence and absence. Lang’s works, constructed from foam, latex, steel, and resin—materials with a past—stand in quiet defiance of definition. They ask questions but resist answering them.

The Language of Materials: Deconstruction and Reinvention

Lang’s approach to sculpture, much like his approach to fashion, revolves around transformation.

Materials are just materials despite their past.

– He explains.

Yet, in his hands, these materials carry emotional residue. His stacked, slashed, and contorted forms—whether towering monoliths or compressed, fist-like masses—hold history in their fibers, evoking tension between past and present.

His practice mirrors his approach to fashion: juxtaposing hard and soft, order and chaos, elegance and rawness. His towering columns recall the fabric remnants of his early career, now hardened into sculptural permanence. Elsewhere, bound and folded sculptures suggest the residual energy of bodies, movement, and memory.

A Conversation with Space: Art Beyond Control

Lang’s sculptures do not sit passively; they challenge their surroundings. He welcomes the ways in which space “violates” his works, disrupting any notion of fixed meaning. His past friendship with Louise Bourgeois, a master of psychological sculpture, perhaps reinforced this ethos.

Memory is a form of architecture.

– Bourgeois once said.

Lang’s work inhabits that idea, constructing structures of recollection and reinvention.

At Schindler House, his sculptures interact with the stark, angular environment, their surfaces absorbing and deflecting light, their shadows deepening the mystery. Some pieces feel eerily anthropomorphic—crouched, bent, burdened with unseen weight. Others evoke industrial relics, their textures recalling both decay and resilience.

Open-Ended Encounters: The Viewer as Collaborator

The viewer completes the work, bringing their own interpretations, histories, and emotions to the encounter. His sculptures, much like his minimalist fashion, are about what is withheld as much as what is revealed. They demand patience, inviting the audience to linger, to observe not just the material itself but the voids, the absences, the spaces left open for contemplation.

This openness to interpretation extends to the sculptures’ futures.

A sculpture will eventually be placed in different contexts and will respond for better or worse each time.
— Lang acknowledges that context reshapes meaning.

His works are not fixed; they are fluid in meaning, adaptable to their surroundings, shifting with light, shadow, and the perspectives of those who stand before them. In this way, they echo his designs in fashion—garments that transformed with the movement of the wearer, silhouettes that carried different stories depending on who inhabited them.

It’s an embrace of unpredictability, a relinquishing of control that mirrors his departure from fashion years ago. Just as he walked away from an industry built on authorship and identity, he now releases his sculptures into the world, allowing them to be redefined, recontextualized, and ultimately completed by time and experience.

At What Remains Behind, Helmut Lang reminds us that the most compelling art does not demand understanding—it invites exploration. His sculptures stand like silent sentinels of the unknown, their forms both challenging and familiar, their presence hauntingly unresolved. They do not tell a story; they pose a question. And in that uncertainty, in that refusal to dictate meaning, they achieve something rare: they remain alive.