Marko Baković's 'Artefacts' Exhibition Seen by Kees de Klein

Artist Marko Baković
Photography Kees de Klein
Image direction Robin Burggraaf
Model Debbie Simons

Leather remembers.

It remembers weight before it remembers shape.
It remembers friction before it remembers design.
It remembers the warmth of a body long after the body has gone.

This exhibition begins by removing that body.

Between March 2–4, Marko Baković presented his Paris Fashion Week debut. Instead of a traditional runway, the shoe designer foregrounded experiment and process. A series of leather sculptures, constructed using shoemaking techniques, explored what happens when wearability is no longer the goal. Craft is freed from function; the shoe becomes object.

Days before the exhibition opened, Baković invited photographer Kees de Klein into his Amsterdam studio. The resulting imagery captures a practice in motion: industrial machinery alongside works in progress, gestures that shift from precise to forceful, leather stretched, cut, pressed, and held in tension.

Suspended between documentary and editorial, the images trace a designer testing the limits of his material.