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.