Kering-owned Italian luxury menswear house Brioni has tapped four contemporary artists—Seth Price, Karl Holmqvist, Tobias Madison, and John Armleder—for their fall ad campaign, WWD reports.

Actors and actresses have long graced the covers of fashion magazines and sleek ad campaigns, but now thanks to Brioni, artists are now standing in for models and celebrities.

Fashion brands have often collaborated with artists in campaign runs—in 2013 Kenzo worked with Maurizio Cattelan for their surrealist-inspired fall ads in the guise of his absurdist print project, Toiletpaper magazine. 

But it’s definitely not often that artists are featured in the ads themselves. Nicolas Trembley, a Geneva and Paris-based curator and contributor to Artforum, worked with Brioni creative director Brendan Mullane and photographer Collier Schorr to capture four contemporary artists at play.

Brioni fall campaign.
Photo: courtesy WWD.

Seth Price is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist whose work, Vintage Bomber (2006), recently sold at auction eleven times over its estimate. He was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennale, as well as the 2011 Venice Biennale, and his fractured images and videos often address consumerism. Swedish artist Karl Holmqvist, represented by Galerie Neu, is known for his text-based works and poetry. John Armleder’s work is associated with the Fluxus movement, but he has also produced a number of sculptures and paintings. And Tobias Madison, the youngest out of the four, built a “theater of absence” at Frieze London last year.

In the ads, Madison and Price look positively stoic, while Armleder goes against the grain by biting on some leather gloves.

During a talk with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Armleder once said, “In art, whatever you do is a performance.”