Lamb Gallery & Paul Hughes are delighted to present 'Continuities' a group thematic selling exhibition spanning 2000 years of textile arts from South America. Considered the primary art form in the Andean region, Pre-Colombian textiles were vessels to convey identity and became paramount in reflecting social, religious and cosmological cultural visual values.
The aim of “Continuities" is to highlight the influences and affinities between Pre-Columbian textile traditions, in dialogue with modern and contemporary artistic creations, to include artists as Shiela Hicks, Norberto Nicola , Delba Marcolini and Ptolemy Man, shedding light on the formal and conceptual assimilations of those Pre-Columbian artworks into the work of these modern and contemporary artists, in a stunning visual narrative across 2000 years, connections between old art and new will be revealed as both intentional and as aesthetic affinities. Many of these artists shared a reverence for Pre-Columbian Andean arts and their artworks reflect its power to inspire bodies of work rooted in its ancient abstraction and its spiritual depths. In each artist we can view a contemporary response to this archaic alternative reality. Amongst these Andean textiles will be a selected group of feathered textiles, feathers are omnipresent in Pre-Columbian Andean arts as a part of expressing Andean beliefs and cosmologies. This symbolic significance is universal because there is hardly a person on Earth who has not seen a bird fly without dreaming of being able to rise with it. These ancient artists associated anthropomorphised birds with fertility and other elaborate shamanic ritual activities.
