Peter Fillingham’s Vaudeville
Peter Fillingham, 8s, Helter Skelter, 2025, MDF, wood, steel rod, satin, acrylic sheet, nails, paint. Photo: Rebecca Fanuele. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & Los Angeles
Fillingham’s latest work reclaims nostalgia, Englishness and working-class culture, volatile ideas in today’s political climate
All nine works in Peter Fillingham’s exhibition Basil Dress speak a common language of bright colour, tactility and playfulness. Assembled from found materials, their slightly faded reds, greens, blues and yellows evoke handmade children’s toys passed down from a previous generation (the artist was born in 1964) and, more widely, twentieth-century British entertainment. At the show’s spiritual centre is Fruit Salad (2025): a tweed jacket, plaid overcoat and folded trousers hung on simple but stylised steel racks. Fillingham enlivens the garments with strips of multicoloured fabric sewn onto their surfaces, black pompoms and frilly collars. These upcycled articles, we’re told, once belonged to Basil Dean, founder of the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) and grandfather of artist Tacita Dean, who here contributes a moving text discussing her friendship with Fillingham and offering her take on his sculptural aesthetic.
