Since the Renaissance, the sartorial imagination has inspired some of the most extraordinary interventions into portrait painting. Tessellations, an exhibition which combines new works by Sara Berman and Hannah Tilson, two of London’s most extraordinary reinventors of the portrait mode, channels our present moment through the lens of the historical obsessions with self-presentation in dress. The paintings on show dart back and forth in their layered historical references, taking us into sixteenth-century Venetian wool workshops, the camp performativity of commedia dell'arte, as well as modernist renderings of circus outcasts. Tilson and Berman open up the possibilities for mutual meaning, making sense of dress and the picture, between the self and the sitter’s interior life.
