Anne von Freyburg recycles wearable materials to refashion 17th century Dutch paintings. Her mantra is “I paint with materials” and she deftly manipulates fabrics into images by embroidering onto canvas. Celebrating embellishment as a tool of self-expression, these ‘paintings’ use the visual cues of fashion to suggest art is more than just a decorative object.
Artist statement:
Lately I have been directly responding to the western art historian standards of beauty by appropriating paintings of 17th century old masters such as van Huysum’s Dutch still-lives and the portraits and Venus paintings of Boucher and Fragonard. My interest in the Rococo period lies in the marginalisation of its feminine and opulent appearance. I see the rococo period as a celebration of the senses, the sensual and overwhelming visual pleasures. It felt therefor appropriate to re-use fashion and decorative fabrics for the purpose of translating old masters paintings into fabric paintings. By reworking these decorative and fashion fabrics I would like to emphasize on these visual pleasures and make work that are a feast for the eye and bedazzle you with their looks. By creating a puffy or bloating effect to the fabric-paintings the work becomes more bodily and uncanny and even grotesque. One can see it as a tapestry on steroids. Even though you can’t physically wear the pieces, they could easily be transformed into a piece of clothing. Its surface has all the techniques borrowed from high fashion and in a different shape one could wear it. As the work is a celebration of material and ornamental pleasures and embracing female sensuality, it can also be read as a comment on our excessive consumer behaviour and self-indulgence. Both the rococo, allegoric, portrait and still-life paintings as subjects are seen as mere decoration of a room, empty paintings for the rich. The idea of the self-indulgent self-portrait translated into contemporary fabrics is a reference to the selfie culture and the need to be seen in a certain way. Most of the materials that I use are inexpensive industrial fabrics, but because of its shiny appearance it gives the work a luxurious impression that has it own irony in it.
Image credits:
- Untitled (after Fragonard) 2020, 110 x 155 cm, Fabric painting: acrylic, synthetic-fabrics, spray-paint, tapestry-fabric, hand-embroidery, polyester wadding, and hand-dyed tassel fringes on canvas.
- Detail, Untitled (after Fragonard) 2020
- Untitled (after Fragonard) 2020, 110 x 155 cm, Fabric painting: acrylic, spray-paint, synthetic-fabrics, tapestry-fabric, hand-embroidery, polyester wadding, and hand-dyed tassel fringes on canvas.
- Detail, Untitled (after Fragonard) 2020
- Untitled (after Boucher) 2020, 110 x 155 cm, Fabric painting: acrylic, spray-paint, synthetic-fabrics, tapestry-fabric, hand-embroidery, polyester wadding, and hand-dyed tassel fringes on canvas.
- Detail, Untitled (after Boucher) 2020
- Untitled (after Fragonard) 2020, 110 x 155 cm, Fabric painting: acrylic, spray-paint, synthetic-fabrics, tapestry-fabric, hand-embroidery, polyester wadding, and hand-dyed tassel fringes on canvas.
- Detail, Untitled (after Fragonard), 2020
All Photography: Peter Hope
Bio: Anne von Freyburg (@annevonfreyburg) is a Dutch artist living and working in London. She has a BA in Fashion design and received her masters in fine art at Goldsmiths University of London in 2016. In 2018-2019 she was part of the Florence Trust Residency in London. Von Freyburg’s practice rethinks textile and the decorative within the tradition of painting. It embraces and subverts the female gaze, the feminine and pretty. Historically, craft and decoration have been perceived as lesser than the “intellectual” fine arts. By combining them, von Freyburg challenges this underlying hierarchical system. Her mixed media paintings are shown in the UK, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands and are in various private collections all over the world.
Anne’s work will next be programmed at the James Freeman Gallery, check the website for more details of opening post-lockdown.
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