Blood. Anti-Textiles 1960-1973

The exhibition features works created between 1960-73, when Sadley for the last time participated in the Lausanne International Textile Biennale. It will also be the first show dedicated to Sadley’s early work since artist’s death in 2023. 

Crown Princess (fragment),
1961, wool, silk, 250 × 70 cm 

Icarus (fragment),
c. 1960, mixed media, 300 × 130 cm 

The artist’s fabrics, first shown at the Lausanne Textile Biennale (1962) alongside those of Magdalena Abakanowicz, provoked polarising reactions from the critics. One French journalist called the artists barbarians, while Lenor Lansen invited Sadley to the Wall Hangings exhibition, which he cocurated at MoMA in 1969. Reporting on the event, the artist says: “We were just very real, and to them downright barbaric. We proposed some things that shocked them”.

“King” and “Queen”, “She” and “He” are the most common titles of Sadley’s works from this period, being the first spatial, conceptual realizations. To create is to touch the mystery, to talk to the spirits. Sadley interspersed the fabrics of the 1960s with elements of wood, metal, leather and fur, showcasing the evolution of materials used to build a shelter. His later productions, however, retain the purism of an individual medium. 

“I am, or at least I think I am, like a mother giving birth. She experiences this pain for herself, but the child is for the whole society. For us, not just for her.”2 Sadley creates the beings of the primal mother and the primal father. A phallic He woven from a fishing net against Her, a monumental 3-meter-long female reproductive organs. It is a reference to the beginning of creation and the birth of a new idea of fabric. 

The artist symbolically portrays the moment before conception, the mythical 
creation of new life. Taking inspiration from the art of primal peoples, he reduces 
individuals to genital shapes giving them supernatural powers. His art draws on 
myths, age-old desires, fears, fetish and magical totems.