From Elle Sweden to the Telegraph in the UK, there was a number of articles and reviews or Material World at Textil Museet, the National Textile Museum of Sweden. Borås Tidning printed several articles but we thought we’d share this one from art critic Agnes Brusk Jahn, translated from Swedish.
Fascinating jeans art at Textilmuseet
Ian Berry’s exhibition shows an extraordinary eye for nuances, says BT:s reviewer Agnes Brusk Jahn.
The last couple of years it’s been a lot of talk about recycling, upcycling and circular fashion. The more that’s exposed about the textile industry’s heavily negative impact on the environment, the more initiatives have come to change the industry. Even if some of them are pure greenwashing, most of them are innovative and hopeful. The denim artist Ian Berry on the other hand, ends up in a category of his own.
Ian Berry’s work is art, not fashion. Not because the two can’t go hand in hand – the artist has in the exhibition cooperated with the fashion designer Jonathan Christopher, who has designed incomparable garments in response to selected art works, and Lill O Sjoberg, with the innovation twood (textile-wood) where old denim becomes a hybrid between textile and wood.
Ian Berry collects old jeans fabric and creates artwork of it. At a distance his “tavlor”, if that’s the correct word, may look like denim fabric that the artist has painted in different shades. But if you move closer you realize that every shadow, light shift, motive and silhouette is a piece of fabric of its own in exactly the right shade, that has been attached to another, and another, to create the motive the artist wants. A city train on elevated rail. An almost empty pub. A swimming body, whose shape changes by the movements of the water. He makes skin shine and metal glisten. It is outstanding.
His extraordinary eye for nuances and shadows is complemented, in addition to craftsmanship, by the artistic eye for the motives he chooses. Reflections in a calm pool. A lonely girl in an empty hallway. Cityscapes.
