Soup presents the gallery’s fifteenth exhibition, Harry Freegard’s debut solo exhibition ‘Gorgeous’⁣. Harry Freegard (b.1995) is a British artist living and working in London. He completed his BA in Fashion Design at Central Saint Martins in 2018, where he now teaches.

Following early success in the fashion industry that included collaborations with renowned brands such as Chanel, Balenciaga, Dior and Vivienne Westwood, in the past year Freegard has dedicated much of his time to a compulsive art practice that incorporates drawing and textile collage. Employing an almost automatist approach to making, each artwork is imbued with both anxious energy and hopeful potential as he draws, sketches, cuts, stitches and sews quickly and intuitively until compositions emerge. The practice serving as his connection to a spiritual plane, Freegard aims to alchemise our innermost desires into intimate, empathic depictions of figures and flowers, each a ritualistic offering or textile talisman; manifestations of a meditative need to create.

Embracing the unavoidable, innate interconnection of art and commerce, Freegard considers the works themselves as an alternative, invented currency. He borrows colour palettes from the paper banknotes of the pre-polymer era – the pinks, oranges, violets and turquoises of cold, hard cash – to create tradeable tokens, a Monopoly money Midas of paper and silk. Here, however, the stern monochrome inventors and industrialists of a bygone age are replaced with the artist’s friends, lovers and favoured pornstars. Framed with delicate silk detailing and wild, exposed threads, some are respected and earn their hard edged outline, others beg to be encroached upon by the embroidered additions. 

Alongside, we find fabric flowers proudly aware of their sexual connotations straight from the Robert Mapplethorpe playbook, all the while disguising more subtle and sentimental indications of everyday domesticity – nostalgic nods to a grandmother’s textured, floral wallpaper or the decorative designs of a lace doily. Their silken stripes evocative of both a particular Britishness as well as elements of Freegard’s former foundations in fashion, recalling the pinstripes of a tailored suit, the ticking of a mattress or the bright bands of a boating blazer.