Fabric Designer Offers Prize

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31076, 3 June 1966, Page 2

Fabric Designer Offers Prize

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright) LONDON.

Modern art has provided the inspiration for a wave of new ideas in fashion in the past few seasons. Designers have garnered ideas for fabrics, and styles, from the art galleries.

Now, London fabric designer, Zika Ascher, is hoping to provide the artists with some ideas —a new medium, in fact, in which to work. In an international contest, he is offering an award, to be known as the Ascher Award, for the best work of art in which fabrics are used. The term covers a very wide range. It could mean a two-dimensional picture executed as a collage, or it might be a three-dimensional object more closely allied to the art of sculpture. How much or how little actual textile material goes into the finished work of art is left to the whim and inspiration of the artist; the only stipulations are that the size must be limited to a dimension of 42 inches in any one direction, and no entry may measure less than 20 inches. Ascher had no idea of the tremendous interest his award would arouse among artists all over the world, many of them well-known names. Inquiries have come from all five Continents, from as far apart as Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong, Australia, Chicago, Ceylon, as well as from African countries. There have been requests for entry forms from many parts of Europe. The entry will, therefore, be truly international and the three eminent judges will have an extremely difficult but very stimulating experience. -As well as the award of £350 to the winning entry, an exhibition is planned of the most interesting entries. It will be shown first in

important galleries in Britain and later it will tour galleries overseas.

The three judges will be Mr Roland Penrose, chairman of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts; Mr Norman Reid, director of the Tate Gallery, London; and Mr Bryan Robertson, Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. Entries have already arrived from overseeas, including two works from Australia and New Zealand. The final date for entries is June 15. Imagination in the use of textiles is, of course, the quality for which Zika Ascher made his name. In blending threads, in working out new weaves he has often presented the mills which produce the famous Ascher fabrics with sizable problems, for he him-

self is an artist in this sphere. One of the newest fabric effects resulting from his artistry is a novelty woollen material with a mother of pearl finish.

In cottons for the 1966 summer season, Ascher took some of the exquisite prints on a plain weave fabric from his established range and gave them a third dimension, or texture, by overprinting a cotton lace or by using a cotton woven with a flock pattern as the basic fabric. Printed piques, for example, take on a completely new look when an unusual weave is overprinted with a modern geometric design. Ascher is an artist in design and colour as well as in weave and texture. He feels that the trend in truly geo-

metric patterns has only just begun, that what we have seen so far in textiles have been merely variations of about six of the simplest patterns.

He has bought abstract paintings from modern artists such as Sonia Delauney and used them to introduce a wonderful range of colour combinations and permutations in fabrics. In fact he sees possibilities in modern geometric patterns which will bring about a whole new conception in printed textile design. Colour remains one of Zika Ascher's great personal interests. Though his own taste is for subdued, subtle shades, he has worked out colour combinations in all imaginable forms and divided these into types or groups of colours.

In one stylised flower design with flowing lines he worked out 1300 permutations of colour! There were hand printed in his own design studio and took 45 yards of pure silk. From those he has selected 40 colour ways to put into production.

“I did it because I liked it” he said, the artist in him taking precedence over purely commercial interests.