Art reviews: IKEA: Magical Patterns | Catalogue: 25 Years of the Centre for Advanced Textiles
The IKEA textiles show at Dovecot Studios is colourful and on-brand, but there’s a disappointing lack of information, writes Susan Mansfield
IKEA: Magical Patterns, Dovecot Studios ★★★
Catalogue: 25 Years of the Centre for Advanced Textiles, Garnethill Gallery and Window on Heritage, Reid Building, Glasgow School of Art ★★★★
Many of us might admit to having a love-hate relationship with IKEA. So ubiquitous has the Swedish furniture giant become that people across the world share the experience of being sucked into its megastores only to emerge hours later, regardless of what you went in for, clutching an order of meatballs to go and a jumbo packet of tea lights.
With 460 stores in 62 countries it’s easy to think of IKEA more as a corporate steamroller than a pioneer of modern design. Nonetheless, it has done much to make the modern accessible, affordable and desirable.
The first touring exhibition created by the IKEA Museum in Älmhult, Sweden, IKEA: Magical Patterns focuses on printed textiles, which came to the brand relatively late. When teenager Ingvar Kamprad started his mail-order business selling household products in 1943, he expanded quickly to furniture. Only in 1961 did he adopt textiles; a decade later they represented a quarter of the company’s annual turnover.
The idea behind IKEA textiles seems to have been simple: bold, colourful patterns which broke with the tradition of muted tones and fussy florals. The 1970s heralded a golden age both for modern textile design and for IKEA, as it began its expansion outside Scandinavia. Some of its early geometric patterns with large-scale repeating shapes still look daring today.
The show covers six decades of fabrics, but if you’re looking for the story of IKEA patterns through the ages, this isn’t it. The feast of colour is not arranged chronologically, it is broadly thematic, from geometry to organic forms, abstraction to storytelling. If you want information like a date or a designer’s name, you might find it on the margin of the printed cloth (if its visible), but rarely in the exhibition interpretation.
A key milestone is clearly the work done by 10-gruppen, a collective of 10 Swedish designers who began working together in 1970 and were invited to make a collection for IKEA the following year. But even here, there is only a little about the individuals involved and what they did: Tom Hedqvist gets a mention for bold abstract stripes, Ingela Haakansson Lamm for lines and dots. One wonders if celebration of the individual is not the IKEA way.
One person who is singled out as worthy of attention is Inez Svensson, one of 10-gruppen, a fashion designer and former principal of Konstfack, Stockholm’s University of Arts, Crafts and Design. One of her designs, Randig Banan - bright yellow bananas against a backdrop of black and white stripes - was launched in 1985, then became a cult hit when it was brought back in 2013. Svensson, who died in 2005, asked for her coffin to be draped in Randig Banan.
More stories like that would engage viewers with the people behind the designs, but they are few. There are a handful of vitrines offering some insights into the creative process - bead boards and cut-and-pasted proto-designs on paper. Mostly, however, we just get yard upon yard of eye-popping colour presented with a minimum of words. An area with a sofa and chairs gives visitors the chance to play at mixing and matching with fabrics and cushions.
It would be interesting to know more, for example, about designer Paulin Machado, who undertook a project with refugee women in Jordan to produce a collection of patterns suggesting “homeliness” and “comfort”. Zandra Rhodes, who created a collection called Karismatisk with Ikea in 2021, gets - unusually - a corner of her own, which glows with hot pink.
But there are no in-depth insights into the design process, little on who the designers are or what they’ve done in the rest of their careers and, because this show is IKEA-focused and IKEA-made, no context about bringing modernism to the high street (Terence Conran’s once-thriving Habitat, for example, is another piece of this jigsaw). All in all, this show is unfailingly colourful, on-brand and on-message, but there’s a disappointing lack of real information.
Meanwhile, Glasgow School of Art celebrates 25 years of the Centre for Advanced Textiles (CAT), opened in 2000, when digital fabric printing was in its infancy, to offer a commercial service to external clients and a resource for staff and students. While CAT’s printing machines trundle away busily on the ground floor of the Reid building, the adjacent corridor and exhibition spaces host a retrospective celebrating some of its work.
Capable of producing bespoke fabrics in a large or small quantity, CAT has undertaken a wide range of projects from haute couture to interior design, TV production to academic research. It has printed silk for a catwalk show by fashion designer Giles Deacon and speaker-covers for Glasgow designers Timorous Beasties in a collaboration with Glasgow-based luxury hi-fi company Linn. It has printed fabric used in the design of the drama series The Buccaneers, now streaming on Apple TV+.
There’s a four-piece snowsuit designed by Grayson Perry, printed on quilted PVC and worn by him for a number of public occasions, and Silken Refuge, a gorgeously silky flame-like backdrop by Alberta-based artists and exhibit designers Bernd Hildebrandt and Liz Ingram. There are colourful lap quilts made by textile designer Laura Spring for the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, and outfits designed by Jilli Blackwood for Team Scotland to wear at the Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony in 2012.
The show also highlights some of the research the GSA team has carried out into historic designs with a length of Calyx Blue designed by Lucienne Day and a striking wall-hanging by GSA-trained Robert Stewart, both from the 1950s. There is space only for the highlights, and understandably the focus is on the commercial rather than on student initiatives, but this is a busy, energetic celebration of a project which seems to be very much in keeping with the original founding spirit of GSA.
IKEA: Magical Patterns runs until 17 January; Catalogue: 25 Years of the Centre for Advanced Textiles until 18 October
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