Tadek Beutlich was a seminal determine within the mid Twentieth-century reinvention of craft weaving as an artwork kind. A brand new present on the Ditchling Museum of Artwork and Craft in East Sussex would be the first survey in additional than 25 years of his groundbreaking work each as a textile artist and a printmaker.
The exhibition will embody giant works woven at Gospels, Beutlich’s Ditchling studio between 1967 and 1974, with free-standing off-loom items and experimental reduction prints made utilizing tree sections, Lycra and foam rubber.
Among the many most essential items will probably be Dream Revealed (1968), a 2.5m-high hanging shroud of unspun jute, mohair and horsehair. At the moment beneath restoration—mud and bug injury are a conservation headache for textile artwork—it has not been seen in public since 1969.
Tadek Beautlich’s 2.5m-high shroud Dream Revealed (1969) © Tadek Beautlich
Born in Poland in 1922 to a German father and a Polish mom, Beutlich was demobbed in Britain in 1946 after serving on each side within the Second World Warfare (first as a German military conscript after which within the Polish Corps of the British military). A pre-war artwork scholar in Dresden, he resumed his research in London, starting on the Sir John Cass Technical Institute earlier than turning to textiles at Camberwell College of Artwork and Crafts, the place he additionally taught for greater than 20 years.
Ditchling, a fairly village with simple connections to London and to the Newhaven ferry port for France, has attracted artists ever since Eric Gill arrange his craft guild there within the Twenties. Among the many earliest arrivals was Ethel Mairet, a champion of vegetal dyes and hand-loom weaving. Beutlich’s Camberwell tutor Barbara Sawyer launched him to Mairet, and later he purchased Gospels, Mairet’s residence and studio, after her dying. Beutlich labored there for seven years earlier than transferring on, first to Spain after which again to Felixstowe, in Suffolk, the place he died in 2011.
Beutlich earned worldwide recognition for pioneering authentic methods and supplies. “He was an amazing innovator, all the time experimenting, pushed by a superb artwork method,” says the Ditchling Museum’s director, Steph Fuller. “There’s all the time been a tough core of followers, and there’s been an amazing legacy of up to date makers who have been taught by him. Throughout the textile subject his work is well-known however he’s not so seen within the wider artwork world. Now that textiles are being taken extra significantly as an inventive medium, we’re hoping this exhibition will change that.”
• Tadek Beutlich: On and Off the Loom, Ditchling Museum of Artwork and Craft, 18 January-22 June
