‘When The Curtain Falls’
Blue Shop Gallery
5th December 2024 - 22nd December 2024
Drapery has always been used to symbolise a variety of ideas. In portraiture, silks, furs and linen signify a sitter’s wealth and status, in religious painting shrouds and veils are commonly associated with the divine. By contrast, the folds of bedsheets or the curve of clothing often might hold an erotic undercurrent. Where curtains and veils might conceal, the shape of a satin dress serves to accentuate the human form, inviting our touch rather than prohibiting it.
From Giotto’s ‘Kiss of Judas’, to Cezanne’s ‘Still life with drapery’; Magritte’s ‘The Lovers’ and Tracey Emin’s ‘Unmade Bed’, drapery has been a preoccupation of painters and sculptors throughout art history.
When an artist depicts drapery, they have the opportunity to demonstrate the most fundamental forms of artistic skill, rendering contours, detailed textures, and varying hues of light reflecting off of complex surfaces. Contemporary artists are continuing this tradition, using drapery as the artists of the Renaissance to demonstrate their technical prowess, whilst using it to symbolise strikingly contrasting ideas.
Whether sheer chiffon shrouding lovers, or heavy velvet gathered hiding a stage, clinging cotton cloth to flesh or a flag or ribbon whistling in the wind ‘When the curtain falls’ is a group show that celebrates the materiality of fabric and how it celebrates who we are and where we find ourselves.
Exhibiting Artists
ALEJANDRO SINTURA
ALICE NEAVE
ALMA BERROW
ALLYSON KEEHAN
FRANCES FEATHERSTONE
GEORGINA ODELL
HELEN KINCAID
JACKSON JOYCE
JESS COCHRANE
KATY PAPINEAU
KAJA STUMPF
LUCY RAY
MICHALIS KARAISKOS
PLUM CLOUTMAN
SAMANTHA FELLOWS
SHAWN HUCKINS
SOPHIE VALLANCE
TOM WHITE
VIVIEN MCDERMID
XANTHE BURDETT
More info here