Hormazd Narielwalla
Le Petit Echo de la Mode No.36, 2013. Collage on original tailoring pattern, 29.6 in by 20.5 in.
Hormazd Narielwalla is a London-based artist who works with tailoring patterns. His work mines a seam of precious material, a streak of radical abstraction hidden in Le Petit Echo de la Mode, a French domestic fashion magazine, published between 1897 and 1983. The magazine contains tailoring patterns that, for efficiency’s sake, layer the life-sized templates of garments onto paper supplements. Narielwalla challenges to view this sheet not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. Shattering the female form into precise overlapping facets flattened not as views of a subject but as the object itself. Predating Futurism and prefiguring Cubism these artworks abstracted the female subject to a degree more radical and precise than the highest aspirations of the 1912 manifesto Du “Cubisme”. narielwalla.com 16