Stepping into the Limelight with Dora Kloppenburg

During the exhibition Starker Auftritt!/Stepping into the Limelight! A Shoe exhibition at the GRASSI Museum für Angewandte Kunst of Applied Arts in Leipzig, Germany, we will highlight the different themes and introduce some of the participating designers to you.



Dora Kloppenburg is a Dutch product designer specialising in shoedesign. Who finds her inspiration in constructions, architecture and the anatomy of the foot. She is continually exploring the boundaries of the shoe. When is a shoe still a shoe? What possibilities can be explored while keeping a shoe wearable?

She translates these ideas into a graphic and clear image. Her experimental ideas are transformed into a wearable product. This open and experimental approach results in surprising new designs. Next to her startling shoes she also designs special accessories and jewellery.

The three pairs of shoes of the Remotion collection are on display, including the video, in Starker Auftritt!:
Communism, construcive architecture, man as a machine, as a tool. Turning the machine on together in the interests of the greater good. What would it be like if man existed solely to serve the purposes of the shoe? Does the shoe still need mankind in order to be a shoe? As a designer, Dora Kloppenburg adopted these hypothetical issues as the basis for her collection (2012), while she also carried out research into constructions driven by human locomotion.

Starker Auftritt!/Stepping into the Limelight!
A Shoe exhibition at the GRASSI Museum für Angewandte Kunst of Applied Arts in Leipzig, Germany from 28th of March till the 29th September 2013. Together with Sabine Epple, the curator of modern art of the GRASSI Museum, Liza Snook selected 220 exclusive shoes from the Virtual Shoe Museum, supplemented with German artists and designers who created shoes.

Starker Auftritt!/Stepping into the Limelight!
GRASSI Museum für Angewandte Kunst
Johannisplatz 5-11, Leipzig, Germany

More shoes by Dora Kloppenburg at the Virtual Shoe Museum.

Photograph by Lonneke van der Palen.