Anne von Freyburg
2021 FIRST-PRIZE WINNER
Location: London
Education: Goldsmiths (Fine art)
Biography
Anne von Freyburg is a Dutch artist based in London. She studied her MA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, graduating in 2016, and her BA in Fashion Design at Hogeschool voor de Beeldende kunsten Arnhem, Netherlands, graduating in 2001. This October she is part of the Cob. x PLOP Residency in London. In 2019 she was awarded a residency at the Florence Trust in London, and in 2016 was shortlisted for the Art Gemini Prize. Anne has exhibited in London, the Netherlands, Germany, and Spain. Her work has been published in Art Scope magazine (US), Embroidery art magazine (UK), Textiel Plus magazine (NL), Art Unplugged UK, Art Verge, PAN and the dream magazine (US) and many others. Von Freyburg’s work is in several private collections all over the world.
Submitted work
Title: Feminizing the Canvas
About the work
The large-scale textile paintings I am presenting are reconstructed Rococo portraits made out of a mixture of tapestry and contemporary fashion fabrics. The imagery focuses on a stylised idea around feminine beauty as found in the tradition of Boucher and Fragonard. With these works I attempt to raise questions about taste, femininity, high and low art and the constructs of female identity. The appropriated portraits are created with acrylic ink and then translated into hand-stitched fabrics and sewing techniques that give the work an almost bodily presence. Whilst on the one hand playful and referencing the decorative quality of their sources, the over-indulgence in these works also points to the excesses of throwaway fashion, selfies, and consumerism. By combining fine art with applied art in a conceptual way I aim at blurring the boundaries between them.
