list.co.uk/visualart PREVIEWS & REVIEWS | VISUAL ART
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FASHION MARY QUANT V&A Dundee, postponed due to COVID-19 virus
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It’s hard to overstate the importance of Mary Quant in the world of everyday fashion. We have her to thank for many of today’s wardrobe staples: miniskirts, jersey dresses, mix and match separates, brightly coloured tights. Quant’s high-energy catwalk shows flew in the face of her era’s formality and, in making clothes accessible to ordinary women, she paved the way for today’s budget fashion. This is the first international exhibition
to celebrate her work, coming to Dundee straight from London’s V&A, and has been compiled not just from archive collections and fashion museums but from ordinary women who loaned their own pieces in response to an appeal. In Dundee, women also sent in their stories about the clothes they made using Mary Quant patterns. Opening her shop, Bazaar, in 1955, Quant captured the vibe of young women in sixties London with fashion which was colourful, comfortable and just a little bit rebellious. As the exhibition shows, in a world where trousers were still not considered suitable attire for women, Quant used cloth intended for gents’ suits to make quirky dresses with names like Barrister and Bank of England. As hemlines rose, she changed the way ordinary women dressed and how they thought about clothes. (Susan Mansfield)
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FILM INSTALLATION DOUGLAS GORDON: K.364 DCA, Dundee, postponed due to COVID-19 virus
k.364 is a work which has gained meaning and gathered political resonances over the last few years,' says Beth Bate, director of Dundee Contemporary Art, explaining her decision to show Douglas Gordon’s large-scale, multi-screen video work almost a decade after its only UK showing in London. ‘I’m very eager to present it in the political and social context we find ourselves in now.’ The film documents the contemporary journey of Israeli musicians Avri
Levitan and Roi Shiloah by train from Berlin to the Poland of their parents. It’s an enormously powerful symbolic crossing, given the dark significance of these landscapes to Jewish history in Europe. In Warsaw, they are seen playing Mozart’s ‘Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat major’, whose alternative name is this artwork’s title.
‘On the way, they talk about their experiences as Israeli Jewish people, as descendants of survivors, and about their connections with the European Jewish experience,’ says Bate. ‘It’s a portrait of their friendship, but more than that it’s a film about how culture joins us, and about how our families and our histories connect across borders. It’s a film with particular resonances, as we see these people talking at a time when it feels like history is unfurling.’ (David Pollock)
DESIGN MID-CENTURY MODERN: FROM CONRAN TO QUANT Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, postponed due to COVID-19 virus
Everything modern becomes retro eventually, and the mid-century modern design movement bears more of a sense of a moment in time than most, even as those designs created during the period possess an unending sense of the future they imagined. Emerging out of the post-Second World War period, they were inspired by the schools of thought which had created modern architecture and formed the Bauhaus school of design in the early half of the 20th century, with a sleek functionality fusing to a signature elegance which still informs what’s regarded as stylish to this day. This exhibition looks at some of the social and political circumstances which
drove the movement, through some of its most well-known British clothing, furniture and homeware designers (the movement also existed in America, and incorporated architecture). In particular, Mary Quant was a clothing designer born in London to Welsh teachers, who started a small revolution with the miniskirt and famously said ‘fashion is a tool to compete in life outside the home’; Terence Conran (who designed a shop for Quant, and later the Ocean Terminal shopping centre in Edinburgh) founded the hugely successful furniture and homeware store Habitat; and Laura Ashley, who – with her husband Bernard – sold clothing and textiles with a sense of the English Romance and Victorian periods. (David Pollock)
1 Apr–31 May 2020 THE LIST 103