Once dismissed as overly decorative or too commercial, the art of window dressing has long been sidelined in cultural discourse. Overlooked by many institutions that historically prized painting and sculpture over design and display, the shopfront was seen as too entangled with consumerism to qualify as significant artworks. But Fresh Window, an exhibition at Museum Tinguely curated by Adrian Dannatt, turns this narrative on its head. At a time when online shopping is threatening to overrule the high street, Fresh Window reclaims the window display as a site of spectacle, resistance, and reinvention that had a significant impact on the course of art history.
“Window displays, by their nature, belong to the public,” says curator Adrian Dannatt. “They sit at the threshold between commerce and art, between exclusivity and accessibility. They invite anyone walking by to engage with them.” Fresh Window brings this legacy to life through painting, installation, photography, drawing, and sculpture, photographs, archival materials, and full-scale reconstructions of historic displays, featuring artists including Berenice Abbott, Marina Abramović, Atelier E.B. (Lucy McKenzie and Beca Lipscombe), Eugène Atget, Peter Blake, Christo, Gregory Crewdson, and many more, each engaging with the visual language of display. And, the exhibition does not stop at the museum’s doors. New artistic interventions in shop windows across Basel with StadtKonzeptBasel and former students from the Institute Art Gender Nature Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, to extend the show into shop windows in the city. Even today, designer brands see value in collaborating with artists. But here, the window isn’t just a marketing tool; it’s a stage and a portal, where commerce meets imagination.
The idea for the exhibition grew out of Dannatt’s earlier exhibition at the museum, Impasse Ronsin: Murder, Love, and Art in the Heart of Paris in 2020, which explored the Impasse Ronsin, a tucked-away cul-de-sac in Montparnasse in Paris that was home to a number of artists including Brâncuși, Max Ernst, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely between 1886 to 1971, who lived and worked there in a heady mix of collaboration, chaos, and experimentation. Artists François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne, also lived in the Impasse and began their careers designing window displays for Dior, working closely with Monsieur Dior and later Yves Saint Laurent. Claude designed jewellery and accessories for Saint Laurent's runway shows, creating sculptural vines and metal leaves to his designs. She also created custom body casts, including a famous gilded bronze mold of model Veruschka's torso. Claude’s collaboration with Dior continued through 2017, when her work featured in Maria Grazia Chiuri's debut collection. What began as window dressing became a decades-spanning artistic partnership.
“I hadn’t realised, when I first proposed the Fresh Window idea, just how embedded window displays were in these artists’ lives,” says Dannatt. “Tinguely himself started out as an apprentice window dresser in Bern and Basel at the age of 16, working for over a decade in the trade.” Even Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg made their living designing store displays, operating under the alias ‘Matson Jones’. What might seem like a sideline was, in fact, a vital space for artistic invention. That idea lingered, and after Impasse Ronsin, Dannatt returned to the museum with a proposal for a new show focused entirely on the shop window. Fresh Window traces how artists, from the Surrealists to Pop icons to contemporary practitioners, have used the shop window as a space of fantasy, disruption, and social critique. “It’s a show about thresholds,” he says, “between art and commerce, public and private, visibility and illusion.” And it all began, fittingly, with Tinguely in a storefront.
In mid-20th-century New York, window dressing at the luxury department store, Bonwit Teller, under the creative direction of Gene Moore, became a key part of the art scene. The window displays blurred the lines between art and advertising, providing emerging artists at the time, including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns with a visible, experimental platform. The shop windows explored mass culture, consumerism, and spectacle, using techniques like transparency, layering, and repetition, which anticipated Pop Art's focus on mass production and imagery. “They were experimenting in plain sight,” says Dannatt. “The high street became a laboratory for form and ideas.”
One of the most notorious moments came in 1939, when Salvador Dalí created two windows at Bonwit Teller in New York titled Day (Narcissus) and Night (Sleep), using a worn Victorian mannequin for Day. The mannequin’s decayed and outdated appearance symbolised the darkness beneath narcissism. Bonwit’s customers were reportedly outraged and prompted a manager to replace it with a sleek mannequin without consulting Dalí. When the artist saw the change, he was furious and stormed into the window, breaking the glass. What started as an act of artistic provocation quickly escalated into a real-life spectacle: the display window had to compromise between artistic expression and commercial sensibilities. Tinguely brought a similar spirit to his early window commissions in Basel. His displays for shops like Ramstein Iberg opticians and Tanner books featured wire figures and moving parts that subverted the sleek minimalism of retail design. “Tinguely’s windows were never about selling,” says Dannatt. “They were about interrupting and creating moments of surprise, mischief, and joy that stopped you in your tracks.”
The exhibition moves through time and geography, showing how artists across the 20th and 21st centuries have reimagined the shop window as a space of radical artistic potential. Through photography, Berenice Abbott and Eugène Atget captured the evolution of urban storefronts as reflections of cultural change. In 1976, Marina Abramović's performance Role Exchange involved her sitting in the window of a brothel in Amsterdam. Martha Rosler’s work in the 1970s, especially in her Bringing the War Home series, used commercial windows as backdrops for exploring political themes. Through collages and photo montages, she used the window as a place to frame the public's engagement with war, consumerism, and media representation. Anna Franceschini transforms a dormant display into a slow-motion film loop of rotating mannequins, while Martina Morger’s Lèche Vitrines (2020) features the artist licking luxury storefronts, a gesture both carnal and critical. In another display, a collaboration between Atelier E.B. presents garments hanging in eerie stillness, inspired by defunct Soviet department stores and 1970s DIY fashion manuals. The display critiques not only capitalism but the aesthetics of its collapse. These pieces, along with others in the exhibition, push viewers to reconsider the role of the window in shaping public imagination.
The exhibition poses a sharp, timely question: in an age of e-commerce, gentrification, and post-pandemic drift, does the shop window still matter? Can it still captivate, provoke, or tell a story? Curator Adrian Dannatt thinks so: “Window displays are not just backdrops for products—they’re installations, performances in their own right.” Fresh Window argues that the storefront remains a vital stage where art, fashion, and commerce collide, often more boldly than in the gallery. That tension, between artistic ambition and retail function, isn’t a compromise; it’s the point. It’s what gives these displays their seductive, often surreal power. In a cultural moment where storefronts are vanishing, the exhibition reminds us that shop windows were never just about selling things, they were stages for visual storytelling, sites of aspiration, fantasy, identity, and community. Today, with department stores fading into memory and luxury retail retreating into exclusivity, Fresh Window insists on the urgency of looking again: at both the history and the radical potential of the streets we’ve taken for granted.This exhibition insists that the high street is far from obsolete and is a site of deep cultural memory and untapped possibility. In doing so, it challenges us to reconsider not only what we’ve lost, but what we might choose to bring back.
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Fresh Window. The Art of Display & Display of Art at Museum Tinguely, Brussels.
With artworks by Berenice Abbott, Marina Abramović, Atelier E.B. (Beca Lipscombe & Lucy McKenzie), Eugène Atget, Peter Blake, Christo, Gregory Crewdson, Vlasta De- limar, Sari Dienes, Marcel Duchamp, Elmgreen & Dragset, Richard Estes, Anna Fran- ceschini, Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz, R.I.P. Germain, Sayre Gomez, Ion Grigo- rescu, Nigel Henderson, Lynn Hershman Leeson, María Teresa Hincapié, Jasper Johns, John Kasmin, François-Xavier Lalanne, Bertrand Lavier, Martina Morger, Robert Rauschenberg, Martha Rosler, Giorgio Sadotti, Tschabalala Self, Johnnie Shand Kydd, Sarah Staton, Iren Stehli, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Jean Tinguely, Goran Trbuljak, Andy Warhol, Jiajia Zhang.
Sofia Hallström is a writer based in London.
