Pioneering American Minimalist Agnes Martin is world-renowned for her vast, meditative canvases, with broad planes of luminous colour and trembling, hand-drawn lines. Primarily a painter with a capital ‘P’, and with little interest in fashion, she might seem an unlikely figure to associate with fabric and textiles. Yet closer examination of her practice, and indeed…
Category Archives: TEXTILES
In her sparse, elemental canvases, British artist Sandra Blow captures fragile, fleeting moments, often bleached out with HEATHER linen’s cold, hazy light. A pioneering abstract artist of the 1950s, Blow challenged the macho, male-led school of Abstract Expressionism with a surprising informality, incorporating unexpected found materials such as sawdust, sackcloth and plaster alongside pale colours…
Berlin-based artist Gulnur Mukazhanova received a peculiar inheritance from her grandmother: a collection of traditional Kazakh garments and textiles. She wore one of the garments for her wedding, to question the dominance of the customary white dress, while the rest have inspired her recent works. Sadly, traditional crafts have been steadily disappearing in Kazakhstan, Gulnur’s…
Painter, poet, filmmaker and sculptor, Danish artist Per Kirkeby had a prolific practice spanning multiple styles, but underpinning his ideas was a fascination with the structures and patterns of nature. The fertile, olive shade of green in DRIED HERB Linen appeared often in his evocative, expressive paintings, a colour that allowed him to express the…
MAROON Linen’s deep, dark red often appears in the art of German painter Gerhard Richter, smeared across his canvases in daring streaks of deliciously thick oil paint. One of the most prominent living painters in the world, Richter’s art has encompassed a huge range of styles, from monochrome photorealism to expressive abstraction and almost everything…
Richard Diebenkorn is one of the greatest colourists in the history of American art. Throughout his long and varied career, he moved through various styles of figuration and abstraction, but it was always an emphasis on the expressive properties of bold, brilliantly bright colour that he returned to over and over again. In soaring shades…
For Kazakh artist Almagul Menlibayeva, fabric is both a way to tell a story and a metaphor for storytelling itself. In photography, video and digital works she uses fabric as a subject and a character. Take The Red Butterfly, which features a woman swathed in seemingly endless red fabric, wearing numerous skull caps, and in…
Like many artists of her generation, mid-20th century sculptor Dame Barbara Hepworth saw the importance of honing an intimate personal style, one that could reflect the same language as her art. And like her bold, sleek sculptures, her way of dressing was equally as elegant, classic and refined, often with practicality in mind. Along with…
There is a quiet, entrancing magic to Marc Chagall’s art, a quality that allows us to escape the challenges of life, if even just for the briefest interludes. Deep indigo blues like BLUE WHALE appear often, invoking the dark blue air of dusk, when day turns into night and the mind slowly shifts into a…
With a successful career spanning more than 60 years, Serbian-American artist Marina Abramovic has jokingly named herself the “grandmother of performance art.” In this time, she has pushed her body to the extreme, inflicting pain, suffering, trauma and violence on herself in the name of art. Her work is no theatrical performance – instead it…
British painter Francis Bacon made some of the rawest and most visually arresting images of the late 20th century. A true painter’s painter, Bacon embraced the viscous, tactile energy of oil paint, applying it in great streaks and swathes to emphasise the emotional impact of his brutally confrontational subjects. These included contorted bodies and faces,…
SILVER LAKE BLUE’s soaring, luminescent blue stretched out across Helen Frankenthaler’s vast, abstract art, invoking endless blue skies or glassy pools of water. A pioneer like no other, Frankenthaler made her name in 1950s New York, a leader in the second wave of Abstract Expressionism. Her light, airy canvases broke away from the impasto, painterly…
In this series, I’ll look at art works featuring fabric by three very different women from Kazakhstan. I’d like to find out why Almagul Menlibayeva created epic videos and photographs of women swathed (or strangled?) by traditional fabrics in front of historical monuments. I’ll discover how Gulnur Mukazhanova reapplies felting techniques to create haunting face…
American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat came of age in 1980s New York, a time when the worlds of art, fashion, music and celebrity were colliding into one. Much like his contemporaries and friends Andy Warhol and David Bowie, Basquiat brandished a public image that was as quirky, distinctive and irreverent as his art. Loose Armani suits…
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham made her name in the mid-20th century as a leading figure of the radical St Ives School in postwar Cornwall. But her long and varied career extended well beyond this timeframe, lasting up until her passing in 2004. She continued to be an innovator in her later years, delving into new territory that…
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