Rose Uniacke At Frieze Masters

This October Rose Uniacke made her debut at Frieze Masters, London. For Rose, this provided a unique opportunity to bring together two pre-eminent textile artists in dialogue, Simone Prouvé ( b 1931) and Peter Collingwood (1922 - 2008). 

It was an unexpected but inspired pairing. As curator and historian Glenn Adamson noted in his introductory essay, “They have a shared interest in refractory translucence and taut abstraction, yet also completely contrasting approaches to composition”. Prouvé’s ethereal weavings hang alongside the more mathematical and open works of Collingwood’s macrogauze and angle-fell series.

"Found colour can be used to very different effect and, in the late 20th century, the long-standing question of the natural versus the artificial, the gentle as opposed to the declarative, was a crucial one for two highly innovative textile artists. Peter Collingwood was modest about his abilities as a colourist, but his deliberately muted hues are actually a crucial element in his practice. His linen works of the mid-1960s were made using a loom of his own devising, on which he could give angles to normally parallel and vertical warp threads. An admirer of bright diagonal Bedouin patterns, Collingwood pared back colour for his own 'macro-gauzes' to make superbly structured and highly sculptural textile abstractions, whose numinous hues draw the viewer into their method of making."

"Translucency is just as important for Simone Prouvé. Her colour journey began in the early 1960s, when the tones she found in existing fibres became the starting points for her abstract, or semi-abstract, tapestries, improvised like jazz. Since the 1990s, Prouvé has researched and incorporated non-flammable synthetic threads - like Clevyl, Kanekalon and Kevlar - into her work, allowing herself to be guided by their unexpected textures and colours, by how they behave in light, by their treasured irregularities."

Words from Luke Syson, curator of Stand Out, at Frieze Masters.