Irenebrination: Notes on Architecture, Art, Fashion, Fashion Law, Science & Technology: April 2017

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Weaving A Diary of Brushstrokes: Maria Morganti's X Bonotto @ The Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice

The 57th Venice Biennale will start in a couple of weeks' time and, if you're heading there and looking for a place where you may have a break while still enjoying art head to the café designed by architect Mario Botta at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia to check out Maria Morganti's installation "Development of a Painting".

Created for the café, this compact project revolves around colours and textiles: the walls of this space will be covered in fabric pieces developed in close association with textile manufacturer Bonotto, established in 1912.

The core idea for this installation comes from a previous artwork: in 2008 Morganti produced the painting "Quadro per la Sala dell'800" taking inspiration from the Querini Stampalia collections. During each of her visits she picked a colour from a different work of art, starting with the flower in the hair of Alessandro Milesi's "La Modella" (1910; View this photo). Morganti kept on collecting various colours and reproduced them one by one as a layer of painting on her canvas. Her painting is therefore the result of the superimposition of these shades.

The artist preserved on cards the sequence of these chromatic layers that - she points out - weren't created by her, since she merely discovered and highlighted them.

Invited by Chiara Bertola to create a new permanent installation for the café, Morganti decided to return to the work she had created in 2008 and to her diary of brushstrokes.

Morganti added two further dimensions to her research, first of all an architectural one: Botta's design characterised by a grey ceiling and floor end up wrapping and containing Morganti's coloured surfaces on the walls.

Then she added another twist to her project via Bonotto's textiles: the artists attempted indeed a comparison between the colours on her canvases and Bonotto's practice of creating the fabric through a warp and a weft. She therefore developed a fabric with Giovanni Bonotto composed of many different threads which together create a single colour.

From a distance, the textile canvases look like large monochrome works, but a closer look will reveal that the colour consists of numerous nuances.

This gesture forces the visitors to explore a texture from close up, meditating about the power of colours and the juxtaposition between the work of an artist and that a textile manufacturer.

Morganti also envisages this permanent installation as a cyclical work: the installation is completed in its entirety after climbing up to the second floor and returning to see Morganti's work in the 19th century room of the museum.

Maria Morganti's "Development of a Painting" is at Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Campo Santa Maria Formosa, Castello 5252, Venice, from 14 May 2017.

Image credits for this post

1. Maria Morganti
Stratification with amazonite, 2017
Photograph by Daniele Zoico

2. Maria Morganti
From Querini to Castelvecchio
Castelvecchio, Verona 2010
Photograph by Francesco Allegretto

3. Maria Morganti
Travel Diary. Pellestrina, 6 - 15 August 2016

4. Maria Morganti
Sedimentation 2015 #4
Photograph by Francesco Allegretto

5. Maria Morganti
Sedimentation 2014 #4
Photograph by Francesco Allegretto

6. Maria Morganti for Bonotto

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Book Alert: New Fashion Illustration (CYPI Press)

Mention fashion illustration to real connoisseurs and they will launch into a lecture about the poetry, elegance and style of René Gruau. The Italian-born artist gets more than one mention in the volume New Fashion Illustration (published on Gingko Press' imprint CYPI).

As the title suggests, the book is a collection of artworks by a selection of artists from all over the world, including Sara Vera Lecaro, Masaki Mizuno, Anne Cresci, Cecilia Carlstedt, Nicole Jarecz, David Despau, Ëlodie, Katrinn Pelletier, Ko.Machiyama, Stina Persson, Yana Moskaluk and Pippa McManus. Each illustrator presents their work via short interviews: questions revolve around their inspirations, techniques, passions and the future of this art and how they think it will evolve.

Artworks range from Haute Couture to ready-to-wear, mainly from relatively recent collections, but there are also beauty illustrations, posters for a variety of cultural events, personal interpretations of fashion, editorial art, adverts and drawings commissioned by famous brands. Some of the artists included have indeed worked for internationally renowned fashion houses and brands; others are fairly new illustrators and a few of them are also part of the Colagene Creative Clinic.

There are illustrators who favour traditional materials such as ink, pens and watercolours or mixed media; others love to experiment with new digital media and graphic tablets. Quite a few mention childhood and children's fairy tales as inspiration, but many other have specific fashion or art icons firmly in mind.

The more personal illustrations in which the artists included flowers, animals, architectural elements and landscapes and did not borrow from a specific and recognisable fashion collection are actually among the best ones.

Some of the illustrators featured in the volume also work as textile designers, another aspect that may be of interest to students interested in learning more about the opportunities this career may offer.

The book should have maybe been entitled Journeys Through Fashion Illustration since the artists included come from all over the world.

Readers will therefore move from Ecuador, Chile and Costa Rica to Canada, Singapore, France, Belgium and Siberia while leafing through the pages of this volume, the international cast proving that fashion illustration is not just trending at the moment, but it is a desirable and highly creative career.

All images in this post courtesy Gingko Press/CYPI.

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Modern Myths in Tropical Shades: "Chris Ofili - Weaving Magic" @ The National Gallery, London

Classic mythology can offer great inspirations to creative minds: in 2012 Turner Prize-winning artist Chris Ofili took part in an exhibition at London's National Gallery that featured three contemporary artists responding to Titian's great paintings depicting classical stories from the Roman poet Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Ofili is back at the National Gallery with "Weaving Magic", a new body of works that culminates in a sort of mythological tapestry, "Caged Bird's Song". The latter is commissioned by The Clothworkers' Company and made in collaboration with the master weavers at the Edinburgh-based Dovecot Tapestry Studio.

The works on the walls of the National Gallery's Sunley Room should be interpreted as preparatory sketches for the final watercolour that was then turned into a textile work of art.

The various characters that Ofili incuded in the work - figures that he calls "contemporary demigods" - are interpreted in different ways in the sketches.

The tapestry is set in the Trinidadian landscape where Ofili now lives and works and can be broken into several vignettes: a barman (black Italian footballer Mario Balotelli, whose head appears in several interpretations among the drawings) is shaking and pouring a drink that seems to form a waterfall.

The water ends up in a glass held by a woman lying on a beach with her naked partner who is playing a stringed instrument. From the sides of the tapestry two figures look at the scene, a woman in evening wear and a man carrying a birdcage.

While one inspiration for the title may be Maya Angelou's 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the tapestry is an imaginative work of art that at times calls to mind the tropes and colours of the costumes and sets Ofili designed for the Royal Ballet a few years ago.

The tapestry stimulates the imagination and the senses as visitors may easily imagine the sounds of the man playing, the waterfall splashing and the bird singing, but the most interesting thing remains its eye-catching combination of colours.

Five master weavers at Dovecot Tapestry Studio in Edinburgh - Jonathan Cleaver, Freya Sewell, Emma Jo Webster, Louise Trotter and Naomi Robertson - transferred the work from a watercolour and rendered it in wool and viscose.

Tropical shades of royal lilac, blue atoll, island green and acid yellow seem to prevail, but the weavers also played with nuances, at times breaking one colour into five different threads to come up with multiple shades.

In a press release Ofili states: "'The Caged Bird's Song' is a marriage of watercolour and weaving. I set out to challenge the weaving process, by doing something free-flowing in making a watercolour, encouraging the liquid pigment to form the image, a contrast to the weaving process. With their response, which is an interpretation rather than a reproduction, the weavers have paid a type of homage to the watercolour that I gave them as well as to the process of weaving."

This is the first time Ofili works with tapestry, and the exhibition could also be considered as a way to discover the various phases behind one work and appreciate the amount of time it takes to complete an artwork, in this case around two and a half years (definitely a lesson for many involved in the fast and furious fashion industry).

"We were thrilled when the Clothworkers' Company embraced Dovecot's proposal for a Chris Ofili designed tapestry for their Livery Hall, and by Chris' interest in accepting the commission," Dovecot Studios Director David Weir stated. "Chris' instinctive response to the medium and openness to collaborate is wonderful. The time taken for thoughtful interchanges with the weaving team to understand the medium, have resulted in an extraordinarily beautiful design."

Dovecot Tapestry Studio is offering the chance to discover the creative process behind the piece during a one day workshop (Saturday 20 May, 2-4.15pm). Master Weavers from the studio will explain how they created the tapestry; their talk will be followed by a weaving demonstration and a tour.

The weavers will then offer the opportunity to participants to try their hand at weaving on a loom. Hopefully they will also encourage people to do some sample weaving in the same shades employed for Ofili's piece, you can indeed bet that the tropical allure of subtle tones of green, blue and violet will mesmerise the lucky participants.

"Chris Ofili: Weaving Magic" is at the National Gallery, London, until 28th August 2017.

Image credits for this post

1. Chris Ofili
The Caged Bird's Song, 2014–2017, Installation view
Wool, cotton and viscose
Triptych, left and right panels each 280 x 184 cm; centre panel 280 x 372 cm
© Chris Ofili. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London, The Clothworkers' Company and Dovecot Tapestry Studio, Edinburgh. Photography: Gautier Deblonde

2. Chris Ofili
The Caged Bird's Song (Black ink), 2014
Ink on paper
39.6 x 104 cm
15 5/8 x 41 in
© Chris Ofili
Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London

3. Chris Ofili
The Caged Bird's Song (She) 2, 2014
Watercolour and charcoal on paper
39.6 x 26 cm15 5/8 x 10 1/4 in
© Chris Ofili
Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London

4. Chris Ofili
The Caged Bird's Song (Him), 2014
Watercolour and charcoal on paper
40 x 25.9 cm
15 3/4 x 10 1/4 in
© Chris Ofili
Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London

5. Chris Ofili
The Caged Bird's Song (Voyeur), 2014
Watercolour and charcoal on paper
39.4 x 26 cm
15 1/2 x 10 1/4 in
© Chris Ofili
Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London

6. Chris Ofili
Balotelli (Cocktail) 2, 2014
Ink on paper
49.9 x 33.5 cm
19 5/8 x 13 1/4 in
© Chris Ofili
Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London

7. Chris Ofili
Balotelli (Sweet Cocktail) 1, 2014
Watercolour and charcoal on paper
24.3 x 15.7 cm
9 5/8 x 6 1/8 in
© Chris Ofili
Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London

8. Chris Ofili
Cocktail Serenaders 7, 2014
Watercolour on paper
26.1 x 20 cm
10 1/4 x 7 7/8 in
© Chris Ofili
Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London

9. Chris Ofili
Cocktail Serenaders (Waterfall) 2, 2014
Watercolour and ink on paper
51.8 x 33.2 cm
20 3/8 x 13 1/8 in
© Chris Ofili
Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London

10 and 11. Chris Ofili, tapestry detail, Dovecot Tapestry Studio, 2016
© Chris Ofili. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London, The Clothworkers' Company and Dovecot Tapestry Studio, Edinburgh. Photography: Gautier Deblonde

Posted at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Metaphors of Pain: The Meaning of Discarded Garments and Accessories in Art and Ballet

Piles of discarded clothes and accessories always affect us in rather negative ways: the images of piles of rags and shoes in concentration camps, for example, immediately conjure up in our minds the atrocities and the horrors endured by the people who left them behind.

In his "Venus of the Rags" (1967, 1974) Michelangelo Pistoletto juxtaposed instead an industrial replica of a classical statue representing the Roman goddess of love, beauty and fertility, with a large pile of clothes heaped on the floor.

The goddess seems to have her face buried in the clothes, representing a degraded idea of the western canon of beauty. The garments could be interpreted as shadows of human existences turned into rags, but the installation could also hint at physical and tangible proofs of consumerism (the clothes) and at the ephemeral nature of beauty (Venus).

In the first "Venus of the Rags" Pistoletto used pieces of fabrics that he had employed to clean the reflective surfaces of his mirror paintings that he began to produce in the early 1960s; he then gradually replaced the rags with second-hand clothes that ended up turning into a critique of the cycles of consumption.

French artist Christian Boltanski took the discourse further in more recent years with his installations such as "No Man's Land" or "Personnes" employing tons of used clothing symbolising death and life.

As highlighted in a previous post, discarded clothes (and, if you lost someone dear to you and had to go through their clothes, you probably experienced this in person) make us think about the shortness of life, but they also connect us with life since they preserve the shapes of our bodies once we remove them.

Boltanski's shapeless mountains of rags call therefore to mind someone's absence, while they also preserve the essence, the souls of the human beings who wore them and who have turned into anonymous ghosts.

Piles of shoes recently took centre stage in a new performance by the Scottish Ballet: "Each Other" - a commissioned piece by the Israeli-Dutch choreographic duo (Uri) Ivgi & (Johan) Greben (with music by Tom Parkinson) - debuted last week as part of Dance International Glasgow (DIG) 2017.

The piece is performed by dancers dressed in rags on a set covered in 5,000 pairs of shoes - from sneakers to everyday footwear - in all sizes and shapes.

There are no pointe shoes on sight, but there is instead a lot of pain and desperation, as dancers wander through the shoes as if looking for something - or rather someone - that belonged to them.

As the piece progresses performers clear spaces in the piles of shoes, build trenches with them, get buried under them or arrange tomato red shoes in a circle.

Shoes become therefore an integral part of the choreography and, while the final meaning remains open to individual interpretations, it is clear that Ivgi & Greben took as inspiration the times we are living in.

The discarded accessories evoke indeed death camps; migrants and refugees flying their countries and dying before reaching freedom or becoming the protagonists of empty political diatribes.

In a way the pile of shoes in the performance is linked with consumerism as well and with our global obsession to buy and spend: in one section of the choreography the shoes seem to flank a sort of catwalk runway; the tomato red footwear, rather than evoking the iconic Powell and Pressburger's Red Shoes, turn into pools of blood, while the ragged clothing and bare feet of the dancers could also hint at sweatshops and at the divide between rich and poor countries.

These themes seem to fit in with Fashion Revolution Week (until 30th April).

Launched to commemorate the Rana Plaza factory collapse, where 1,138 people were killed and many more injured on 24th April 2013, Fashion Revolution Week culminates with a main campaign encouraging consumers to ask who makes our clothes and demanding greater transparency in the fashion supply chain. Yet it looks like there may be more powerful messages about consumptions and exploitation in the performing arts at the moment than in trendy but temporary campaigns.

Posted at 05:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Allure of Soft Geometries: "Ornamental Patterns - Amsterdam School Mohair Velvets" @ The TextielMuseum, Tilburg, The Netherlands

Functional, practical and financial reasons or mere lack of space prompt most of us to opt for minimalist interior decor. Yet there was a time when rich velvet fabrics were employed to decorate a room in a lavish style.

Velvet was often used on coat racks, mantel shelves or for sofa rugs during the 1920s and '30s.

In The Netherlands the so-called mohair velvets - also known as velours d'Utrecht to reference their origins - had an architectural value as well since they were often employed in interiors designed by the Amsterdam School.

This material is currently being rediscovered by the exhibition "Ornamental Patterns" (until 4th March 2018) at the TextielMuseum in Tilburg.

Not so common and trendy nowadays, mohair velvet is a pile fabric with a surface of upright mohair yarns (from the Angora goat).

When it was employed for the Amsterdam School patterns, mohair velvet became a beloved fabric not just among professional interior designers, but also among ordinary people, mainly for its soft consistency, silk-like flexibility and rich colour palette.

Besides, it was also favoured for its indestructible quality and therefore employed for interiors in theatres and on passenger ships and railway carriages.

"Ornamental Patterns" features a wide range of Amsterdam School mohair velvets, including curtain fabrics, wall coverings and upholstery fabrics, from the museum collection.

While the exhibition highlights the architectural importance of these fabrics, it also introduces visitors to the history of the factories such as Schellens & Marto, and Léo Schellens and the Hengelosche Trijpweverij in Eindhoven. All of them represent over a century of weaving excellence.

The event also shows how artists and textile companies collaborated together from 1917 until 1935.

The rather old-fashioned image of the fabric was refreshed by modern designs in the style of the Art Nouveau and Amsterdam School by Dutch designers such as Theo Nieuwenhuis, Chris Lebeau, C.A. Lion Cachet and Jaap Gidding.

The emphasis in the exhibition remains on the techniques with special displays including a mohair velvet cylinder with a design by Theo Nieuwenhuis and a wooden print block with a pattern by Chris Lebeau.

While the interior design pieces on display upholstered with mohair velvets prove inspiring especially when imagined in a typical Amsterdam School architectural frame, there are plenty of other materials to discover and study, from black and white photragraphs of production facilities to textile adverts. Artists and people who are into illustration will probably enjoy more the books of sketches showing rich selections of pattern drawings.

There is for example a book by designer Albert Lejeune that features several patterns and samples of mohair velvets in various colours that could easily become the starting point for a fashion collection or for very original knitwear pieces.

The Amsterdam School's emotional approach had less influence than the De Stijl, but still managed to produce intriguing designs and, while some may be deemed a bit too old fashioned, others seem to be characterised by very modern geometrical motifs that, if reinvented, may lead to interesting results in various disciplines.

Image credits for this post

1. Designer: Willem Retera Wzn. (attributed); Manufacturer: Léo Schellens & Co., Eindhoven (?); Year: c. 1920-1935; Dimension: 170 x 144 cm; Collection: TextielMuseum; Photo: Tommy de Lange commissioned by TextielMuseum.

2. Mohair velvet divan rug; Designer: Jaap Gidding (attributed); Manufacturer: Léo Schellens & Co., Eindhoven (?); Year: c. 1920-1935; Dimension: 291.5 x 150 cm; Collection: TextielMuseum; Photo: Tommy de Lange commissioned by TextielMuseum.

3. Armchair upholstered with mohair velvet; Designer: Jaap Gidding; Manufacturer: Léo Schellens & Co., Eindhoven; Year: c. 1920-1925; Dimension: 102 x 80 x 80 cm; Collection: TextielMuseum; Photo: Tommy de Lange commissioned by TextielMuseum.

4. Armchair upholstered with mohair velvet in the style of the Amsterdam School; Designer: Jaap Gidding (attributed); Manufacturer: Léo Schellens & Co., Eindhoven (?); Year: c. 1920-1935; Dimension: 92 x 76 x 84 cm; Collection: TextielMuseum; Photo: Tommy de Lange commissioned by TextielMuseum.

5. Mohair velvet curtain "Dandelion" with abstracted dandelion motive; Designer: Chris Lebeau (attributed); Manufacturer: Léo Schellens & Co., Eindhoven (?); Year: c. 1920-1935; Dimension: 298 x 130 cm; Collection: TextielMuseum; Photo: Tommy de Lange commissioned by TextielMuseum.

6. Chair with mohair velvet upholstery "Arend" (Eagle) and wooden stamp; Designer: Chris Lebeau; Manufacturer: Léo Schellens & Co., Eindhoven; Year: c. 1920-1930; Dimension: 120 x 50 x 50 cm; Collection: TextielMuseum; Photo: Tommy de Lange commissioned by TextielMuseum.

7. Interior in the style of the Amsterdam School with two armchairs upholstered in mohair velvet; Designer: Jacobus Hellendoorn (?); Year: c. 1925; Collection: Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam.

8. Mohair velvet tablecloth in red and black with gold accents; Designer: Anton Hamaker (attributed); Manufacturer: Schellens & Marto (?); Year: c. 1920-1935; Dimension: 146 x 119 cm; Collection: TextielMuseum; Photo: Tommy de Lange commissioned by TextielMuseum.

9. Mohair velvet tablecloth with pattern "Siwo"; Designer: Sikko van der Woude (attributed); Manufacturer: Schellens & Marto; Year: c. 1920-1930; Dimension: fabric 150 x 129 cm; Collection: TextielMuseum, drawing loan Eindhoven Museum; Photo: Tommy de Lange commissioned by TextielMuseum.

10. Advertisement Hengelosche Trijpweverij in "De Vrouw en haar huis"; Designer: Theo Nieuwenhuis; Year: 1929; Collection: TextielMuseum; Photo: Tommy de Lange commissioned by TextielMuseum.

11. Mohair velvet upholstery "Cato Neeb" and sales catalogue of the Hengelosche Trijpweverij; Designer: Cato Neeb; Manufacturer: Hengelosche Trijpweverij, Hengelo; Year: pattern c. 1907-1910, production 1998 (remake); Dimension: 416 x 68 cm; Collection: TextielMuseum; Photo: Tommy de Lange commissioned by TextielMuseum.

12. Pattern and samples of mohair velvet in different colours; Designer: Albert Lejeune (attributed); Manufacturer: Léo Schellens & Co., Eindhoven; Year: 1926; Dimension: 32.5 x 25 x 11 cm; Collection: TextielMuseum; Photo: Tommy de Lange commissioned by TextielMuseum.

13. Interior trimming - pressing room of N.V. Eindhovensche Trijpfabrieken Schellens & Marto, Eindhoven; Year: 1947; Collection: TextielMuseum; Photo: Tommy de Lange commissioned by TextielMuseum.

14. Mohair velvet tablecloth in the style of the Amsterdam School; Designer: Unknown; Year: ca. 1915-1935; Dimension: 138,5 x 101 cm; Collection: TextielMuseum; Photo: Tommy de Lange commissioned by TextielMuseum.

15. Coat hanger cloth; Designer: Unknown; Year: 1920-1935; Dimension: 154 x 88 cm; Collection: TextielMuseum; Photo: Tommy de Lange commissioned by TextielMuseum.

16 and 17. Exhibition overview "Ornamental Patterns", 2017. Photo: Tommy de Lange commissioned by TextielMuseum.

Posted at 05:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Art of Freedom: You No Speak Americano Original @ Casoria Contemporary Art Museum, Italy

Italy celebrates today Liberation Day, the end of the Italian Civil War and the end of the Nazi occupation of the country.

There is actually an independent museum that chose to celebrate freedom and human rights with a special exhibition.

The CAM_Casoria Contemporary Art Museum launched a few days ago "You No Speak Americano Original", an exhibition curated by the museum director Antonio Manfredi and featuring 100 artists from all over the world.

The Casoria Contemporary Art Museum was founded in 2005 and it was conceived as an experimental laboratory of ideas and a cultural reference point. Throughout the years the museum has become a safe haven for worldwide artists and has assembled a strong collection of multimedia works (it currently boasts the most complete collection of contemporary Neapolitan artists from the second post-war period till today).

The call for "You No Speak Americano Original" was open to artists of any nationality, race, religion, age and sexual orientation.

Each artist contributed with a 70 x 100 cm poster showing a work of art (paintings, drawings, illustrations, photographs and so on) featuring a slogan or a message in favour of integration and multiculturalism and opposing discrimination, intolerance and racism.

The event hopes indeed to use the language of art to destroy walls and build bridges rather than raising barriers.

The official poster of the event, a sort of call to arts rather than a call to arms, is represented by an image of a clownish Donald Trump as Uncle Sam. Irenebrination took part in the event together with Kutmusic (for the occasion we dubbed our team The Problem Children), coming up with the photographic food project "Inclusion is Our Daily Bread and Butter". The event is open until 28th April and you can check out all the artists and posters at this link.

Posted at 06:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Devalued Currencies, Metaphorical Tapestries: "Yaw Owusu - All That Glitters" @ Gallery 1957, Accra, Ghana

Seen from afar Yaw Owusu's artworks look like pleasantly eye-catching geometrical tapestries made with a sort of glittery paint. Yet a closer inspection reveals something surprising: the pieces made by this Ghanaian artist aren't actually made with paints, but with a hard metallic material – coins.

Gallery 1957 will unveil in a couple of month's time the first solo exhibition (10 June - 31 July 2017) dedicated to this artist. Born in 1992 and now living and working in Accra, Yaw Owusu studied at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, graduating with a BA Fine Arts degree in 2016.

His works have been included in various collective exhibitions and his pieces are also part of the permanent collection of the Musée d'Art Contemporain Africain Al Maaden (MACAAL), Marrakech. Owusu employs coins to question the failures of Ghana's ongoing infrastructural development.

The artist's loose change assumes a higher value for the way it is arranged, forming sculptures, geometric motifs, and even symbolical maps or giant flags. Above all the one pesewa coins installations pose questions around economic and political independence in contemporary Ghana.

These small copper coins were indeed introduced to try and solve the local economy's inflation in 2007. As the years passed, though, and in an unfavourable financial climate, the coins lost their economic value, and they are no longer widely accepted, but they have turned instead for the artist into an intriguing material.

Owusu actually had to acquire the coins by negotiating with The Central Bank of Ghana – the only bank to still distribute the pesewa – a bureaucratic process that became part of the artist's practice.

The installations combine therefore financial, but also social, and political issues. Owusu's maps could be indeed used to symbolically show the impact of inflation, but at the same time they also call to mind old colonial maps, referencing the past and the present, while suggesting an alternative future.

Some of the pieces include over 20,000 coins and the process of arranging them together is painstakingly long: the bronzed coins undergo various natural and chemical treatments related to the types of commerce prevalent across Ghana, a process enacted by the artist to mimic the effects of trade and time which would usually alter the appearance of exchanged currency.Owusu treats the coins with salt, for example, to reflect the south coast's fishing industry, or vinegar to reference the agricultural industries of the mid and eastern regions of Ghana.

The coins are then fixed onto wooden panels or draped onto surfaces to create a flexible metal installation reminiscent of El Anatsui's tapestries.

The artist also makes in his pieces an interesting juxtaposition: his sculptures are robust and solid, but the coins are in a continual state of flux and they react and change colour with their surroundings. In this way Owusu's pieces turn into metaphorical tapestries that allow the artist to comment about mismanaged political and socio-economic structures, while hinting at the struggles for survival.

Gallery 1957 is among the few art ventures trying to bring African artists to the forefront. Previous events at the gallery focused on artists who repurpose in their works materials such as the yellow plastic containers found throughout Ghana. You can bet we will see very soon more artists represented by Gallery 1957 at exhibitions and events in Europe, so keep an eye on the gallery's site.

"Yaw Owusu: All that Glitters", Gallery 1957, Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast City, PMB 66 - Ministries, Gamel Abdul Nasser Avenue, Ridge - Accra, Ghana, 10 June - 31 July 2017.

Image credits for this post

1, 2 and 8, Yaw Owusu, Untitled, 2016, courtesy the artist and Gallery 1957, Accra.

3. Yaw Owusu, (Detail) Resurrence, 2017, Coins on Plywood. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery 1957, Accra

4. Yaw Owusu, (Detail) Trail of Change, 2017, Coins on Plywood. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery 1957, Accra

5 and 6 Yaw Owusu, All that Glitters, 2016, installation view, courtesy the artist, Gallery 1957, Accra and Macaal, Marrakech

7. Yaw Owusu, Resurrence, 2017, Coins on Plywood. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery 1957, Accra

Posted at 06:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bright & Bold Op Art Fabrics

In yesterday's post we looked at a textile designer inspired by art, so let's continue the fabric thread today with a recent design by Vlisco with an arty twist about it.

The design is part of the Bright & Beautiful collection and is characterised by a very basic motif of circles.

Yet the circles are transformed into an intriguing hypnotic illusion continuously repeated on the fabric.

The optical illusion is achieved by varying the size of the circle pattern, adding geometrical figures inside the circles (from squares to rhomboid star-like shapes) or by dividing the circles in two parts, and by creating bold juxtapositions of three (or at times four) bright colours.

Available in a variety of combinations, this bold pattern calls to mind Op Art works à la Victor Vasarely.

Posted at 07:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Patterns in Bloom: "Lucienne Day - A Sense of Growth" @ The Collections Centre, The Whitworth, Manchester University

One of the most optimistic textile stories in postwar Britain is linked to the "Calyx" pattern. Designed by Lucienne Day (1917 – 2010) for Heal Fabrics, the pattern was created as a furniture fabric for a room in the Homes and Gardens Pavilion (designed by Lucienne's husband, Robin Day), part of the 1951 Festival of Britain. "Calyx" featured abstract organic prints in yellow, orange and black and went on to become a bestseller in the years that followed, winning Day a gold medal at the Milan Triennale in 1951 and the international design award of the American Institute of Decorators.

The Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester is at present celebrating the designer's birth centenary with an exhibition, "Lucienne Day: A Sense of Growth" (until 23rd July), curated by Jennifer Harris, former deputy director and head of textiles at The Whitworth (she also worked with Day on her 1993 retrospective), in collaboration with Lucienne's daughter Paula Day, chair of the Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation.

Born Désirée Lucienne Conradi, the designer studied from 1937 to 1940 at the Royal College of Art where she also met her future husband, furniture designer Robin Day.

During the '50s Lucienne became one of the most commercially successful British textile designers in a time when industrial design was still a profession for men. She created around six designs per year for Heal's (in 1954, four of her Heal's fabrics won a Gran Premio at the Milan Triennale) while working at the same time for other British and European companies and producing patterns for textiles, wallpaper, carpets, tea towels, table linens and ceramics.

In the 1970s, Lucienne withdrew from industrial design, but focused on creating innovative interior design pieces. Commissioned to design a set of five shutter doors for the John Lewis store in Newcastle, she developed on graph paper colourful artworks that were then transformed into silk mosaic wall hangings.

The exhibition at Whitworth (the designer donated her textile archive to the gallery and the institution holds at the moment one of the world's largest Lucienne Day textiles collections) gives the chance to rediscover Day's works for Heal's and the strong art component behind her textiles.

Day would indeed borrow moods, colours and shapes from works of art such as Saul Steinberg's cartoons, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró and Paul Klee's paintings, Alexander Calder's mobiles and Naum Gabo's sculptures.

She also aimed at creating bold designs that could improve people's lives with their optimistic graphic styles, while, employing the figurative language of art in her pieces, she also offered the chance to those people who could not afford a painting to add to their houses an arty touch via interior design textiles, a concept that called to mind William Morris' art for the people message.

Day excelled not just in creating freshly innovative abstract prints like the ones for "Ticker Tape" (1953) and figurative patterns like "Spectators" (1953), but also in transforming flowers into geometrical shapes, tracing delicate wiry plants, seedpods, twigs, grasses and foliage in her patterns such as "Dandelion Clocks" (1953) and "Herb Antony" (1956), often characterised by surprisingly unusual combinations of colours.

Lucienne also had a lifelong passion for gardening and was a knowledgeable plantswoman. "My mother and I shared a passion for plants and gardens, so I'm moved that the Whitworth is hosting an exhibition celebrating that aspect of her life and work," states Paula Day in the official press release. "Her delight in plants is evident in so many of her textile designs - their quirky individual personalities, the majesty of trees and leaves, the decorative repeat patterns of flowers, and the 'sense of growth' that surges through her great design 'Calyx'."

The show at Whitworth is actually part of the gallery's GROW project to promote the benefits of engaging in horticultural activities to improve mental wellbeing and, during the months of the exhibition, there will be demonstrations and talks inspired by Lucienne Day's designs.

The Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation and the Textile Society are also collaborating on an Award for Lifetime Contribution to Lucienne Day Studies and the recipient of this prestigious award will be announced at The Textile Society's Antique Textiles Fair on 30th April at The Armitage Centre, Manchester. This occasion forms part of the nationwide programme of events to celebrate Lucienne Day's centenary year, but, hopefully, there will be more awards and exhibitions after the centenary as well that will inspire a younger generation of creative minds to follow the steps of this pioneering textile designer.

Image credits for this post

All images in this post copyright the Robin & Lucienne Day Foundation

Posted at 04:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Timeless Inspiration in a Fantastically Surreal Dystopia: On Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus

There is something deeply unsettling but also incredibly fascinating about the volume Codex Seraphinianus by illustrator, architect, painter, sculptor and designer Luigi Serafini. Originally published in 1981 in Italy by Franco Maria Ricci, the volume became throughout the decades an iconic reference book in the libraries of many creative minds – among them architects, fashion and interior designers – based all over the world, and has been rediscovered in more recent years by a new generation of fans.

Suspended between art book and art object, the volume could be described as an encyclopedia of a fantastic world, a sort of alien planet, written in a secret language or an indecipherable and unintelligible alphabet, illustrated by a series of surreal drawings.

The 370-page-long Codex opens with plants and strange Triffids-like fruits and vegetables: Serafini's peppers open up revealing inside a strange juice that has got the colour and consistency of a passion fruit, while artichokes sprout bananas and a plant seems to grow into a chair.

There are little colourful microbes that reside in a rainbow and a series of incredible and disturbing animals, with bodies that integrate see-through parts or fish that look like eyes and rhinos that contain other rhinos.

Human beings aren't missing, but they don't have anything human about them, at times they seem to be reduced to a pair of disembodied legs walking around the streets, or they are manufactured from skeletons and skin by alien-like creatures with mushroom heads, while a lovemaking couple has the power to fuse and morph into an alligator.

Means of transports - from boats to planes - are as incredibly bizarre as the cities they serve, the latter feature labirinthine configurations and unlikely architectures.

There are richly detailed illustrations of fantastic costumes in vibrant shades maybe showing mind-bending fashion collections or, who knows, traditional costumes from far away hallucinated wonderlands.

Different kingdoms - the animal, vegetable and mineral ones - are combined together in this compendium of bizarre flora and fauna, fantastic anatomy, innovative architecture and undiscovered technologies.

The volume closes with the image of a skeletal hand, hinting at the death of the author, while the letters that form the alphabet and the text turn into a magic dust that generates little cute rainbow coloured microbes that, Italo Calvino suggested in his foreword, hint at metamorphosis and at the circle of life.

Though history, fantasy and a high degree of disturbing surrealism seem to prevail in its pages and the book was often compared to the Voynich manuscript, and showed links with Jorge Luis Borges' short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and with the artwork of M. C. Escher and Hieronymus Bosch, the Codex was originally written for the information age and with the processes of coding and decoding in mind.

This is the main reason why it seems to have fascinated a new generation of readers and fans: though we live in radically different times from those that generated the volume, there is more than just a simple connection between the Codex Seraphinianus and digital culture.

When he first created it, Serafini shared the Codex with as many people as possible, as if it were a modern blog; besides the book mainly relies on a visual and global language that doesn't need to be translated (like the images we post on social media or the global language of videogames). At the same time, the unintelligible language of the Codex mirrors the modern crisis of communication and its dystopian images, our collective fascination with aliens, monsters, hybrid creatures or fantastic visions.

So the fame of the book continues: published in the States, in Germany and in The Netherlands in 1983, the Codex saw a new edition courtesy of Franco Maria Ricci (who stopped publishing books, but built one of the biggest labyrinths in the world - the Labirinto della Masone in Fontanellato, near Parma) in 1993 with a preface by Italo Calvino. Rizzoli worked on further editions in 2006 and 2013 with updated illustrations, and Serafini has won in the last few years also the heart of many fans in countries such as China.

The original drawings taken from the historic first edition of the Codex were also part of an exhibition in March at the Maison Alaïa, almost to tell us that Serafini's work has turned into a volume capable of unlocking any kind of creative block, and ultimately proving that, while creating a better world may not be possible, an epic escapist fantasy with a dystopian edge is often at one's fingertips. PS Expect to see Luigi Serafini's fantastic illustrations in a Gucci collection sometime soon: they seem to be the sort of things Alessandro Michele may like.

Posted at 07:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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April 2017

April 30, 2017

Weaving A Diary of Brushstrokes: Maria Morganti's X Bonotto @ The Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice

April 29, 2017

Book Alert: New Fashion Illustration (CYPI Press)

April 28, 2017

Modern Myths in Tropical Shades: "Chris Ofili - Weaving Magic" @ The National Gallery, London

April 27, 2017

Metaphors of Pain: The Meaning of Discarded Garments and Accessories in Art and Ballet

April 26, 2017

The Allure of Soft Geometries: "Ornamental Patterns - Amsterdam School Mohair Velvets" @ The TextielMuseum, Tilburg, The Netherlands

April 25, 2017

The Art of Freedom: You No Speak Americano Original @ Casoria Contemporary Art Museum, Italy

April 24, 2017

Devalued Currencies, Metaphorical Tapestries: "Yaw Owusu - All That Glitters" @ Gallery 1957, Accra, Ghana

April 23, 2017

Bright & Bold Op Art Fabrics

April 22, 2017

Patterns in Bloom: "Lucienne Day - A Sense of Growth" @ The Collections Centre, The Whitworth, Manchester University

April 21, 2017

Timeless Inspiration in a Fantastically Surreal Dystopia: On Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus