New appetite for dream weavers past and present

Textiles are now being embraced by modern artists

The challenges in mounting an exhibition of Medieval and Renaissance textiles are immense – I’m not sure it has ever been done outside of a museum. You’d be lucky if your 600-year-old rug or tapestry was only moth-eaten or drained of colour because, having been made for the Roman Catholic Church, few survived the iconoclastic destruction of the Reformation. In France, during the Revolution of 1789, many were ripped apart for their gold thread because of their aristocratic associations.

Nevertheless, dealer Sam Fogg has managed it, though it’s taken him 25 years of opportunistic gathering and hoarding. His exhibition of 36 miraculously preserved textiles is about to open in Mayfair and promises to be one of the highlights of the forthcoming London Art Week.

The earliest textiles in the exhibition date from about 1400. Called opus anglicanum, they consist of quaint medieval figures of saints embroidered in coloured silk and gilt metal for liturgical vestments. Several chasubles (the ornamented outer cloak worn by priests at mass) are gloriously rich and decorated with

figurative orphreys, an ornamental border, depicting the life and death of Christ. Among those pieces also serving functional purposes are delicate lampas (embroidered borders with repeated designs used for vestments or book covers), altar frontals, ornate carpet fragments, tablecloths and towels.

Perhaps the most visually arresting are woollen tapestries from the mid-15th century, particularly the only known surviving fragment of a tapestry celebrating the marriage of Charles the Bold to Margaret of York, in 1468. This two-metre-high composition of figures in wedding attire still boasts brilliantly coloured red and blue dye. When they were created, these ornaments and vestments were not only costly to make but considered the ultimate status symbol. Over the years, their value has diminished.

Matthew Reeves, Fogg’s medieval specialist, says he and Fogg rarely encounter much competition when buying the pieces. But recently there have been signs of renewed interest, with museum exhibitions in Florence, Utrecht, Chicago and London, at the V&A.

Private collectors tend to be textile scholars, says Reeves, but he is hoping this show will appeal to non-specialised collectors too. Although the rarest and most beautiful items will be priced in six figures (but no more than £350,000), the majority of the exhibits are priced between £6,000 and £50,000.

The exhibition comes at a time when textiles are being embraced by contemporary artists. The Centre Pompidou has just closed its exhibition for the works of textile artist Sheila Hicks, for instance. And painted banners by Lubaina Himid, who won last year’s Turner Prize, are on show at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary

Arts in Gateshead. Meanwhile, in London, the streets are bedecked with banners by artists in celebration of the Royal Academy’s 250th anniversary; and in the commercial sector, the Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes has placed a 16-metre-long tapestry at the heart of her exhibition at the trend sensitive White Cube gallery.

Testing the resale market this month is a collection of tapestries by Milhazes, Peter Blake, Grayson Perry, Gavin Turk and Gary Hume, all for sale at Bonhams. The pieces, which were made for 2008 exhibition Demons, Yarns & Tales: Tapestries by

Contemporary Artists, held in a converted dairy in London, were handmade in China, “in the same way as Renaissance tapestries,” said Christopher Sharp of the Rug Company, who commissioned them. This kept their prices within a more affordable £15,000 to £30,000 range (some large contemporary tapestries can cost in the region of £100,000 to produce) meaning most were sold.

At Bonhams and estimated near cost at £12,000 is Turk’s Mappa del

Mondo, a reference to Seventies conceptual artist Alighiero Boetti’s tapestries of the world map, which have sold for close to £2million. Nearer the £30,000 mark is Perry’s first needlepoint tapestry, Vote Alan

Measles for God, which is based on an Afghan war rug. At auction, the first few Perry tapestries remained unsold but in the run-up to his Serpentine Gallery exhibition last June, a tapestry sold way over estimate for £118,750.

All of this means that if the use of textiles by contemporary artists and their reception is anything to go by, then Fogg could find that fashion is turning his way.