Hungarian Peacocks, 2014

Limited to one, an artist’s book, coloured paper and acetate cut out collages on individual patterns of the tailoring manual.

18 leaves

Dimensions: 34.5 x 24.5 cms

The closing years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were suffused with legendary salons and extravagant finery. This fragile culture, which was to crumble during the course of WW1, is evoked in a poignant artist’s book by Hormazd Narielwalla. In Hungarian Peacocks, the artist adopts a rare tailoring manual from the post-war period and brings colour back to its discarded and damaged pages through a series of intricate hand-worked interventions applied to monochrome garment patterns.

Delicate collages are formed by inserting coloured papers into the geometric facets of each pattern. The water-stained and worn pages of the original document are given new life, and the everyday functional suit patterns of the post-war era are revealed to have iridescent possibilities as stunning new abstract compositions.