FSL Drawing Redaction

Saturday, March 7, 3-5pm

In this special one-day-only exhibition and live event, the attending audience are invited - under set conditions - to cut and take away a piece of the artist’s drawing for free.

Ten years ago, in April 2016, Matt Ellwood exhibited "Frieze Saint Laurent (FSL)"  here at Melanie Roger Gallery. The exhibition involved taking every Saint Laurent advert that appeared in the previous year’s issues of Frieze art magazine; enlarging and replicating them all as charcoal drawings, but with the gallery advertising text from the following page, overlaid on top. This conflation brought the two contexts even closer than a casual flick of the page, forever locked together as a subtle provocation regarding art as luxury. The somewhat controversial creative director of Saint Laurent at that time (and photographer of the images) was Hedi Slimane, who left the fashion house, coincidentally, the same month "FSL" was exhibited.

Slimane subsequently became the creative director at Celine, also leaving that house within three months of Ellwood exhibiting three Celine based drawings here in a group show ("Ellwood, Ford, McLaren"), in July 2024. Those artworks had ‘blind contour figure drawing’ over the top, mostly enacted by audiences.

Slimane himself was the direct subject of Ellwood’s recent "Erasing Hedi" exhibition/event at DEMO in 2025, where the audience were invited to erase charcoal drawings of Slimane’s own face taken from online publicity images taken in order to promote joining Saint Laurent and later, Celine.

This time around, Matt has drawn the very first Hedi Slimane photographed Saint Laurent image ever to appear in Frieze (March 2013, Issue No. 153), exactly one year after he took over the fashion house. Ellwood has also prepared 35 substrates only, identically sized to the large eraser used in "Erasing Hedi", that the audience are invited -on a first in, first served basis- to take one and use as both a template and hanging mechanism, for cutting and later displaying their chosen piece of the artwork.

Back in 2016, "Frieze Saint Laurent" also consisted of eight sculptures that were, in effect, functional ‘soapboxes’ for standing on and enacting a spoken recital of all the exhibitions advertised in one issue of Frieze. For "Erasing Hedi", the drawings were erased on a sculpture/apparatus that separated the participant from the rest of the audience. Now, in "FSL Drawing Redaction", Ellwood extends his functional sculpture practice, by constructing a ramp, the length of the gallery, that one must traverse (much like a model) to get to the drawing and redact their piece.

N.B: Craft knife provided. The artist and Melanie Roger Gallery hold no liability for any injury that may occur during this activity.