Hello London - The Bed, The Bath and The Beyond

After the fake art exhibition held to present her AW16 collection, 25-year-old British designer Claire Barrow disrupts the lines between art and fashion once again and this time is ready to get steady.

Open to the public until the 24th of April at M. Goldstein Gallery in Hackney, London, The Bed, The Bath and The Beyond is Claire Barrow’s first solo exhibition. With reference to a famous American chain of domestic merchandise, the artist winks at social criticism by pointing at consumerism permeating every inch of today’s society and, at the same time, she brings us her own idea of a twisted return to clarity.

The themes explored throughout the exhibition are in fact those of “cleanliness and godliness”. In what the artist herself has described as an “inner journey discovering her own mortality”, even a common and daily ritual as that of taking a shower comes to assume a mystical significance of baptism and purification.

The aesthetic is the same Claire Barrow's work always stands out for: a surreal juxtaposition of naïve and demonic characters, floating as in a Chagall painting and as archetypal as primitive/prehistoric art.

Her dystopic reality, this time, finds a way through toilet rolls, shower curtains and neon signs. The latter, a material typically associated with mundanity, red light districts and packed metropolis' centres, is freed by any stigma and rises as an emblem of purity and brightness. Barrow finds in neon that vibrant spirit that can bring to life the phantasmagorical presences populating her imagery.

 

April 17–24 at M. Goldstein Gallery in Hackney, London.