How much is that Prada in the window? From iconic cinematic moments like Holly Golightly’s longing gazes at Tiffany & Co. displays in Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Yayoi Kusama’s real-world creations for Louis Vuitton shopfronts across the globe, the store window is a frequently seen, but rarely noticed, gateway into the worlds of all things fashion, art and commerce.
This is the idea behind Fresh Window: The Art of Display & Display of Art, a first-of-its-kind exhibition now open at Museum Tinguely in Basel. Running until May 11 and curated by Adrian Dannatt, Tabea Panizzi and Andres Pardey, the showcase features the work of seminal artists like Andy Warhol, Marina Abramovic and Marcel Duchamp alongside installations from today’s up-and-coming creators that pop-up in locations across the Swiss art capital. The goal? To show how art, fashion and shopping are intrinsically linked, and how the act of decorating windows is about much more than making sales.
Those with an eye for fashion are no stranger to the big name creatives who have worked on window displays, but Fresh Window also underlines how common it is for those struggling to make a living to take part. On show alongside evocative works by Jean Tinguely, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns are commissions from an early-career Andy Warhol for Tiffany & Co and defunct NYC department store Bonwit Teller. In some ways, the exhibit suggests that designing a display is something of a rite of passage for those creatives on their journey from starving artist to art world darling.
As Pardey and Panizzi explain, these collabs have become more common with higher-profile creatives: “In recent years, ‘artification‘ has seen a convergence of well-known artists and major fashion brands collaborating on the design of products or shop windows”. Now, these commissions are industry-wide spectacles. If you need proof, look to the monogramatic Takashi Murakami magic currently drawing in punters at Louis Vuitton’s flagship stores.
Installation views, Fresh Window at Museum Tinguely, Basel, 2024
That said, the exhibition is about more than store windows; it’s about how artists interpret these spaces. In fact, this is where the exhibition gets its name. In a 1920 display dubbed Fresh Widow (which deliberately dropped the ‘n’ from the phrase French Window), Marcel Duchamp blacked out a store window in statement about the interplay between outside and inside, public and private. Nodding to this piece in the exhibition’s title, Pardey and Panizzi aim to say something similar: “The work is part of an important section of the exhibition devoted to the window’s function as a connecting, blending and separating membrane that may attract or repel voyeurism and the associated desires. That ambivalence between openness/accessibility and closedness/inaccessibility inherent in the shop window is a central theme for us.”
The curators also spotlight the artists using shop windows to comment on social issues. Take, for example, Marina Abramovic’s 1976 performance Role Exchange, where she spent hours sitting in a window and acting as a sex worker. “Abramović was selling herself,” say the curators, “and in doing so, she was exposing herself to the accompanying sense of shame rooted in social and moral norms. She personally experienced what it meant to be at the mercy of prying eyes.” Or take Martha Rosler’s Greenpoint: New Fronts. On display in the exhibition, these images confront gentrification by chronicling how local businesses are being replaced by international chains catering to the wave of professionals now calling her Brooklyn neighbourhood, home.
Installation view Fresh Window at Museum Tinguely, Basel, 2024. ‘Fenster (Script)’ by Jiajia Zhang, 2023. Photography by Pati Grabowicz
What might be the most interesting part of the exhibition, however, is its expansion into a series of window pop-ups across Basel. Appearing in windows everywhere from hairdressers and orthopaedic practices, the effort sees the museum partner with StadtKonzeptBasel and the Institute Art Gender Nature Basel to create works that share the exhibition’s themes with larger, more diverse public audiences.
Among these pieces is Manuela Morales Délano’s Made in Chile, which turns ‘living stones’ (that she will water and care for throughout the course of the exhibition) into high-fashion bags presented beside a pair of high heels. The point? To illustrate the geographical dynamics of mass production and the dialogues between the fashion industry and her home country.
On the success of these displays, Pardey and Panizzi say that even “the activity of setting up these installations in the shop windows immediately aroused the curiosity of passers-by and the artists got into conversations with many people.”
Fresh Window continues the store window’s long history as an entryway into new worlds, both in Museum Tinguely and on the very streets where the relationship between art, fashion and commerce is formed.
Photography courtesy of Museum Tinguely. Top image: Prada Marfa courtesy of Elmgreen & Dragset.
Installation view of shop windows in the city, as part of the Fresh Window exhibition. Art & Showcase, 2025 Museum Tinguely, Basel. Photo: 2025 Museum Tinguely, Basel; Pati Grabowicz