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Tibor Reich the art of colour & texture Textile design from a beautiful book on his work via @tiborreich. I was so sorry not to have made his exhibition but here’s a sunny design for a grey day. #tiborreich #textiledesign #surfacepattern #midcenturymodern #modernism
Tibor Reich
It is an overwhelming thing to observe the physical manifestations of one person’s life’s work all at once; that is, to hold in your hands a piece of who this person was and what they chose to leave behind. This is what I kept thinking as I pulled neatly stuffed cardboard boxes down from a long wall of shelves in a small south London studio. It was a rare sun-bleached afternoon and I’d ventured an hour by train to see the archive of Tibor Reich, a creative savant who wove the backbone of England’s textile identity during the mid-twentieth century. It was that afternoon when it became clear to me that Tibor’s life’s purpose wasn’t to produce for production’s sake, but to impart on the world a record of what living felt like. The fabrics and ceramics and drawings he created were just a byproduct of that sincere quest.
Tibor’s potent imagination was sparked in the countryside of Hungary, where he was born in 1916. He studied in Vienna at the seat of the Bauhaus school, and brought an inspired way of thinking to a grey and rigid England in the late 1930s. It was in England where he eventually founded his fabric company, Tibor Limited, and where he came to produce a vast amount of work for people and places of all kinds (i.e. for the Queen, for airplanes, for vinyl flooring companies...). He developed new techniques for photo manipulation as inspiration for textile repeats. He built an incredible homestead in the Warwickshire countryside as his family grew (and produced an incredible array of Christmas cards along the way). He created his own colour-coding language, because, of course he did. By taking in all of the sights and experiences the world could offer, Tibor produced a world of his own. Here are some of our favourite pieces. The images included here are sourced from a book about Tibor and his life, Tibor Reich: Art of Colour & Texture.
A 14-Year-old Tibor in Hungary
Tibor had yearned to be an architect. This rendering is an example of the many drawings Tibor produced as a young man as he was exploring this passion. However, because his parents were in the textile business, they convinced Tibor to study textiles when he moved to Vienna for art school.
One of Tibor’s first experiments in woven textiles.
Tibor at Leed’s University.
A printed textile taken from one of Tibor’s many sketches of London. He seemed to be fascinated with urban planning and the patterns humans took in their daily lives.
Original sample books from Tibor LTD.
Advertisements for Tibor LTD fabrics, shown in situ.
Tibor’s fabrics have ended up on many obscure applications. Here we see Tibor in the Concorde Jet, completed in 1976 with Tibor LTD upholstery.
Tibor developed a completely original method of photo manipulation, leading to the construction of some of his most successful fabrics. This is a physical example of the way in which Tibor was determined to understand the world around him by capturing it, and reproducing it.
Tibor also had a hand in developing a ceramics line.
And tiles.
The home Tibor built for himself and his family became a sort of incubator for his ideas.
Tibor developed a language called Collingo. It allowed him to code all of his patterns (and most aspects of his life) within a colour system. In this way, his patterns can be reproduced within a near perfect quality control system.
#tiborreich #withworthgallery #manchester #uk #design #textile
#tibor #tiborreich #manchester #withworthgallery
Last year I started a new project with Tibor Reich and some of this new work was on show tonight at the Margaret Howell flagship store. Many thanks to Tibor and also to the amazing woman standing in front of my work Margaret Howell
WORK #15 (TEXTILES COLLECTION)
Tibor Reich, Raw Coral, manufactured by Tibor Ltd, 1954
All images © Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester.
INTRODUCTION:
Manchester Museum recently opened a new exhibition, Coral: Something Rich and Strange, which explores “the enduring fascination with coral as a material, symbol and inspiration for artists, cultures and societies across the centuries.”
The exhibition features several loans from the Whitworth and Manchester Art Gallery, among other institutions, augmented by a strong showing of museolgocial objects, of course. There is a broad range of art on display and I find the juxtapositions intriguing. The textiles from our collection in this exhibition show two radically different stylistic interpretations of coral. My selection today, that you see above (my apologies for the less than amazing image quality - I took this one myself in the exhibition!) is by British-Hungarian designer Tibor Reich, and is called Raw Coral. Another piece, Synthesis, designed by Sue Thatcher Palmer for Warner Fabrics, is also on show. Although both take the varied forms of coral as their starting point, the outcomes are vastly different aesthetically. If you visit the show, you will see that Palmer’s design is vibrantly coloured and intensely evocative of the underwater habitat which supports the life of these unique creatures. It is stylised of course, but the screen-printed pattern repeats, there is a movement and fluidity to the fronds and branches intertwining. Reich’s design - of which there is also a red, more stereotypically coral-coloured version - takes the tree-like clusters of corals and styles them in a very minimal way, contrasting them strongly with the background colour to create an abstract motif. Both are successful in their own ways, and I would recommend visiting the exhibition to make your own judgments. You’ll also be sure to learn a lot about coral! I have included a Google Hangout below between Kat Box (Marketing Officer), Dr Marion Endt-Jones (who curated the exhibition) and David Gelsthorpe (Curator of Earth Sciences) - so check it out!
Andrew Cheetham (Visitor Services Team)
CURATOR’S INSIGHT:
Tibor Reich (1916-1996), who was an émigré from Hungary, became a leading textile designer after World War II. He often created patterns from photographs that he took of natural forms. Here, a stylised pattern of coral in black and another colour (yellow on this example) has been screen-printed onto a textured cloth woven from cotton and rayon with occasional threads of lurex. According to his grandson, Sam Reich, who is relaunching the company, the design was first used in 1955 for the Council Chambers in Warwick, which was not far from the firm’s mill at Stratford-upon-Avon. The sample length was one of nine textiles produced by Tibor Ltd that were given by the company to Whitworth Art Gallery in 1962 when the gallery first made a concerted effort to collect innovative, industrially-made twentieth-century textiles.
Frances Pritchard (Curator of Textiles)
FURTHER READING:
Book: Lesley Jackson, 20th Century Pattern Design (Mitchell Beazley, 2002)
Tibor Reich obituary: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary--tibor-reich-1319247.html
Textiles at the Whitworth: http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/collection/textiles/
Coral: Something Rich and Strange at Manchester Museum: http://www.museum.manchester.ac.uk/whatson/exhibitions/coral/
CORAL GOOGLE HANGOUT:
