David Fryer, who came through Goldsmiths in the early 1990s in the slipstream of the more famous YBAs, has been a rebel artist who has eschewed commercial galleries and worked within a community of fellow London post-conceptualists. When he was offered a solo show at Mannerheim Gallery in Paris in 2017, he surreptitiously invited fellow artists Paul Emmanuel, Andi Mindel, Adeline de Monseignat, and Humberto Poblete-Bustamante, and presented a group show instead of taking the spotlight himself.
It’s an overdue joy then to at last see a solo presentation of his work at Gallery 46 in Whitechapel. The show presents work from Fryer’s back catalogue, going as far back as his Goldsmiths archive- the touching ‘family mattresses’ piece titled Personalised from 1989 – handmade mattresses in ticking cut to the archetypal outlines of a father, mother, and a teddy bear. He has been long dedicated to the ‘anti-macho’ medium of textiles, but drawing came into focus in his work with a stunning series of London cityscapes in around 2013, and a pencil drawing from that very successful series titled Yet to Come depicts a Blakeian sunset (or is it an explosion?) above the rapidly changing skyline of London Bridge.
Fryer’s enormously successful newest works combine textiles and drawing. Standout pieces in the show combine embroidery with even painterly picture making, as in Domestic, from 2017 -an abstracted study in dense embroidery of the light and shadow of a washing line that would put early Ellsworth Kelly to shame.
His new works combine textiles and drawing, a kind of ‘drawing with thread’ that we see in Double Standards – a series of ragged flags from 2023, and in Spell from 2024, an embroidery of a medieval magic spell written in arcane glyphs, which operates visually like a calligraphic monochrome painting and has an amusing dialogue with painters who give heroic painterly gesture to typography, such as Cy Twombly and Robert Motherwell.
Fryer’s earlier activist urban work is glimpsed in documentation of his quietly poetic intervention of (unauthorisedly) gilding the World War II shrapnel scars in the brickwork of the Royal Mint building in London and a Baroque church in Berlin.
Outstanding in the show is the new work Going Blind, an incredible cotton embroidery that translates Fryer’s pencil drawing cityscapes to fabric and shows a mastery of drawing, light, shade, and luminosity. His cityscapes are vivid and light-filled, they document London’s continuing high-rise-ification, and are also somehow looming and apocalyptic, overpowered by the furious skies above them.
This is a glorious and long overdue exhibition of a dedicatedly irreverent artist. It shows an artist whose work is getting stronger as he gets older. Go down to Gallery 46 to see the work of a true London rebel.
Words Robert Montgomery
David Fryer, In-Retrospect, 5th – 15th June, 2025 Gallery 46
