LONDON.- Camden Arts Centre announces Making & Unmaking, an exhibition curated by celebrated fashion designer and curator Duro Olowu. Featuring over 50 international artists, the show addresses a multitude of themes including portraiture, gender and sexuality through a range of media, bringing together artists whose work articulates a complex and rich relationship to fabric and textiles. Works range from new commissions by artists such as Glenn Ligon to contemporary pieces by Yinka Shonibare MBE, Sheila Hicks and Brent Wadden to traditional West African textiles and Bauhaus tapestries.

Making & Unmaking is the next in a series of artist-selected shows at Camden Arts Centre. The programme strand, which began in 1999, has included exhibitions by Turner Prize winner Simon Starling, Paulina Olowska, Tacita Dean and Richard Wentworth, and has been praised for the rare insight it offers to the inspirations, interests, and thought patterns of each of the shows’ authors.

“Duro Olowu’s talk with Glenn Ligon at Tate Modern early last year was inspirational; their shared passion for textiles connected a richly pictorial conversation about pattern, repetition, politics and process. This take on art and making, formed from a unique understanding of the relationship of fabric to the body, underpins the choices Olowu has made in shaping this exhibition.” – Jenni Lomax, Director

Individually, the works chosen by Olowu address representations of beauty, gender, sexuality, innocence and the body. The latter is depicted in a range of forms – in sculpture (Yinka Shonibare), painting (Chris Ofili, Alice Neel, Lisa Brice, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Meredith Frampton), photography (Claude Cahun, Irving Penn, Neil Kenlock, Nobukho Nqaba, Malick Sidibe) and collage (James Brown, Michael Roberts, Lorna Simpson). In many cases these works also convey the dynamic transformation of cloth when worn as costume or clothing. Collectively, their coming together reveals a common thread that Olowu describes as the ‘process of personal ritual’:

“The more I looked at a work that I was considering for the show – not necessarily textile based or straight-forward painting – the more the intricacy and the beauty of an artist discovering and realising what they are capable of on an intuitive level, came through. I am attracted to specific pieces that take the artist in a direction outside what is regarded as their signature style, things that even they may have overlooked or disregarded. There is an immediacy in many of these examples in which the hand of the artist is felt." – Duro Olowu

Making & Unmaking is a powerful collage, every component of which is imbued with its own story. Olowu invites the audience to journey through these works, the histories and places of their making and to encounter the intuition, training and vision of the artists who created them.