Ester Coen

A unique exploration of the close relationship between art and design, explored through the historic and contemporary fabric designs of Liberty, where avant-garde art has influenced the colourful, geometric collections for more than half a century. Liberty is renowned internationally for its fabrics, especially its floral patterns, but it also has a long history of developing bold, geometric designs. Many of these have been inspired by early 20th-century avant-garde art, notably by the Italian Futurists – by artists such as Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni – and their English contemporaries the Vorticists, including Christopher Nevinson and Edward Wadsworth. In anticipation of Liberty’s 150th anniversary, esteemed couturier and interior designer Federico Forquet has curated a striking new range of fabrics – the FuturLiberty Collection – that carries Liberty’s creative heritage into our own age. The Futurist and Vorticist art that lies behind the new designs is explored by specialists Ester Coen and Richard Cork, while archivist Anna Buruma examines Liberty’s rich history of avant-garde designs. By illuminating the process by which the FuturLiberty Collection came into being, this highly visual study also reveals how art can inform design, making it contemporary, relevant and engaging.

Fuled by a spirit of solidarity with the world of outcasts, Giacomo Balla learned his trade in Turin and reflected the cruel, painful reality of society's underclass with a penetrating, human eye.Parallel to the themes of suffering and alienation, the artist developed an original style of the utmost technical sensitivity rooted in the Divisionist schools of Piedmont region. It is this brushwork with its wealth of glowing streaks, bold contrasts of light and dark, and daring perspective that constituted a unique and extraordinary model for the Futurist generation.In the second, Balla embraced the poetics of Futurism and addressed the themes of modernity in the chromatic synthesis of individual elements of light visible in the Iridescent Interpenetrations. This was followed in the third by exploration of the new dynamic reality with his Lines of Speed.In a gradual progress towards pure mathematical, vertical, diagonal and spiral signs, Balla discovered new categories of representation in its primary parameters, in the amplification of the physical phenomenon, isolated and dissected in its reality as vibratile matter. A vision that plumbed the greatest depths in order to transcend the limits of the frame in an ever-greater response to life, the ultimate signal of a universal force whose power reverberates in the "voices of nature."