Cedric Bardawil, London has opened a solo exhibition from Hannah Tilson titled Staged Surfaces on view during Frieze Week.
For Hannah Tilson fabric offers a duality: it obscures and reveals, it folds and unfolds, it camouflages and it dramatizes. For the artist’s fourth presentation with Cedric Bardawil, Tilson delves deeper into the threads of her work, presenting an ambitious fabric installation where space, pattern, colour and material are each characters in a larger story.
Life-sized figures referencing vintage cutout doll toys perform on a patterned stage, animating the onlooking paintings and works on paper. The installation becomes a portal into these paintings, its veil-like fabrics referencing the layered worlds of her pattern-clad canvases. Here we are invited into Tilson’s dreamlike world, one where the reflections of mirrored city skyscrapers become kaleidoscopic tartan fabrics, and accents of clashing colour pop and dance across a kinetic landscape of forms to create an electric all-consuming hum.
In distinct Tilson fashion there is an implication of intimacy, yet there is something resting just below the surface that we have to search for – an unnameable energy, or a persona seeking discovery. For Tilson, this exhibition signifies a return, the cutout figures she began developing while studying at The Slade are now reimagined as self-fulfilling characters belying their own static existence.
Hannah Tilson, Staged Surfaces, 10th October — 8th November Cedric Bardawil
About the artist
Hannah Tilson (b. 1995) lives and works in London. She graduated from the Royal Drawing School in 2021, completed an exchange programme at the New York Studio School, and earned a BA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2018. Tilson was artist in residence at Plop in 2024, Palazzo Monti in September 2022 and participated in the Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon 2024.
Tilson works across painting, printmaking and installation, layering colours to conceal, reveal and camouflage herself in vibrating spaces, where the body becomes part of a kinetic pattern-scape. Layers are built up like a tapestry or excavated like a fossil, each mark weaving and punctuating a patterned world. Accents of colours clash and hum in a way that feels dazzling and disorienting. Fabrics fold and unfold, patterns shift across these surfaces, becoming spatial and performative, with each world informing the others. Tilson’s solo exhibition Staged Surfaces (October-November 2025) will be her fourth presentation with Cedric Bardawil, London.
