Tadek Beutlich’s practice was in the exercise of creative freedom. Developing and growing his own technique of free warp tapestry, the artist also worked across various media, dimensions, and scales. His outstanding woven sculptures are now the spine to a new, many-limbed monographic exhibition, landed in the Southeast English countryside.
On and Off the Loom builds on a number of significant fibre art exhibitions, including of Magdalena Abakanowicz at Tate Modern (2022), and Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at the Barbican in London (2024). Much like the artist, it challenges binaries and conventions of display. This solo exhibition replaces Beutlich amongst his contemporaries, upholding others’ histories in the process, including Barbara Sawyer, one of his teachers at Camberwell College of Art in London. A highly skilled weaver, who studied with Ethel Mairet at Ditchling in East Sussex in the 1940s, Sawyer received little critical recognition during her lifetime. Over time, her commercial designs for placemats entered the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, a cultural commons for many practioners in this exhibition and beyond.
‘Being on the edge informed his life,’ suggests Steph Fuller, Director of the Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, and curator of the exhibition*.* Born in April 1922 in Lwówek, a small town between the city of Poznań and the Polish-German border, Beutlich’s mother and father were Catholic Polish and Protestant German, respectively. His dual heritages are reflected in his first and last names, his biography, and artistic practice, pursuing education in both countries. During the Second World War, he was first called into the German Army; following his capture by the Allies, he volunteered for the Polish Corps of the British Eighth in Italy.
Eventually demobbed and settled in the UK, Beutlich did not return to Poland – a personal choice. ‘His “outsider” identity worked for him,’ Fuller asserts, the exhibition’s light interpretation allowing space for the ambiguity of the individual, and lived experiences. We are, for instance, left to speculate whether the artist’s name is an Anglicisation, or Germanisation, of his birth name, Tadeusz Franciszek Beutlich.
The outsider within
Beutlich, along with Ann Sutton and Peter Collingwood, was amongst the most important artist weavers of his generation, present in contemporary histories, books, and exhibitions. His integration into British art history is evident in the rich archive materials from international displays, where Beutlich is categorised as a ‘UK artist’, not unlike Abakanowicz, who was supported and promoted abroad as a representative of Polish contemporary art. It is unsurprising, then, that On and Off the Loom is not part of the official line up for the British Council’s UK/Poland Season 2025.
‘There are two people in me’, Beutlich’s assertion which opens the exhibition, though, rather refers to his restless experimentation and will to work ‘directly’. Living and working in Ditchling in the late 1960s and early 1970s confirmed his preference to practice alone, often sending his studio assistants home at lunch for peace and quiet. Despite the increasing scale and commercialisation of his work during this period, much of the money from his commissions went towards the endless conservation of Gospels, the building that served as his home and studio. Moving to Catalonia in 1974, Beutlich was able to refocus his practice, creating countless, smaller sculptures with local esparto grasses.Beutlich’s relevance to this context, and remarkable museum, is only heightened by his passing through. The generous curation, and abundance of glass cases, creates a number of reflections, allowing us to experience and move through the exhibition in a number of ways. Not only can we see these textiles’ backs, but look to new connections between his tactile works, suggestive of a transdisciplinary practice determined by ideas, rather than medium.
Colour, texture, and experimentation
Access to dyes and colours may have been restricted due to the postwar continuation of rationing, but this didn’t seem to wash with Beutlich either. On and Off the Loom is warmly saturated with oranges, pinks, and reds, notably, in the vivid rya rugs (Scandinavian wool rugs) produced between leading European surrealist and abstract artists and weavers in Malta. Implicit is a critical engagement with the “value” of materials, first teaching himself to weave with darning wool from Woolworths, constructing a simple printing press with found wood and scraps of his own garden fence, and sourcing cheap yarns from Spanish street markets.
Here, we enter the exhibition, in conversations between Beutlich’s late works and contemporary practising artists like Tim Johnson and Julie Regnell. These new public and participatory commissions demonstrate weaving as a living and traditional practice, aligning with the artist, who soon shifted his practice from conventional painting in response to a number of exhibitions and demonstrations at the V&A.
On and Off the Loom eschews strict chronological or biographical curation for something more creative, deconstructing the boundaries of linear time. The exhibition begins towards the end, with many drawings from his unpublished book, The Techniques of Free Warp Tapestry – thus presenting the potential for further research and creative interpretations from the outset. Such interventions are particularly important in the context of Beutlich’s relatively small archive, access to which has been further restricted by the British Library’s recent outage. Through international success, he kept a small record of what he made and sold, focusing instead on making itself. Like Sawyer, many of his works are not dated – it is, again, left open to interpretation whether the date is unknown or unrecorded, as less relevant to the maker – which incidentally reinforces their transcendental quality. This is particularly true for the cellular works on paper like Growth II and Bios, which, with dark and vivid inks, delve into deep time and emerge in contemporary artistic interests in natural science and ecology.
Embracing opacity
Beutlich’s atomic and more ethereal works could have interesting conversations with those of his European contemporaries like Hilma af Klint. “I am very down to earth and ordinary”, Beutlich once remarked. “Until I start to make something”, highlighting the transformative potential of artistic production for the individual. More spiritual connotations are raised in the installation of works like Sun (1986), Moon Worshippers (1972), and Archangel (1969), devotional sculptures which demand we lift our gaze.
Though raised Catholic in Poland, Beutlich was neither religious nor so concerned with symbolism. An example of one of his “traditional” double weave tapestries from 1955 is included in the exhibition, but perhaps simply to show how much he shrugged these styles off; his works have a more shamanic quality, termed by some as “folk art from an alternative reality”.
His works often represent, and even become, otherworldly beings of their own. This is particularly true of his fibrous sculptures and aforementioned works on paper. An innovative printmaker, he achieved early success with exhibitions at London institutions, including, of course, the V&A and publishers like Editions Alecto, through which his works entered the likes of the Government Art Collection (GAC).
In a separate space, a selection of the artist’s expressive sketchbook drawings – another obsessive tendency, realised later in life with a biro pen whilst sat in front of the television – are gathered in conversation with Ditchling’s own Stanhope printing press. Beyond an awareness of science fiction, these renderings hint at Beutlich’s entangled art historical and psychological interests. While a bounty of screaming faces and strangled, disembodied birds recall the works of Edward Munch, Hieronymus Bosch, and Francisco Goya, references made explicitly in the theatrical, Punch-and-Judy-esque Grotesques (1991) of the exhibition’s main room. Ungodliness prevails; here, even more spindly, figurative sculptures collapse the human/nature binary, with an array of bodies with legs like roots, hands and ears of corn, and warped arms that clutch like chicken feet.
Hidden in plain sight
Beyond Ditchling, though, a great number of his works remain hidden in plain sight, in collections or “kind of” public display. One example is Bird of Prey (1972), a twisted and plaited sisal sculpture, not dissimilar to the exhibition’s Winged Insect (c.1973), which has long been kept in the Senate House Library at the University of London. Whilst raising awareness of his practice, more recent commercial exhibitions could also restrict access and interpretations of his work, by further displacing the estate. The particular, gapped structure of Stars-X (c.1973), for instance, hangs in conversation with the architectural works of Olga de Amaral – and perhaps even F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book, The Great Gatsby (1925), with its unique eye motif.
Beutlich’s work was first displayed at Ditchling over ten years ago – though Fuller, a “long-term fan”, encountered the artist through their previous work with the Crafts Council – a period in which the Museum’s approach to exhibition-making has greatly changed. As such, On and Off the Loom has proven an opportunity for curatorial reflections and urgent conservation.
At the exhibition’s centre is Dream Revealed (1968), a monumental wall hanging the artist created at Gospels. It was displayed at the Lausanne Biennale in 1969 and, previously, London’s Grabowski Gallery, where he regularly exhibited. There, it was purchased by architect Christoph Bon, a founder member of the practice that designed the city’s Barbican. Despite its scale and import, the work was kept rolled up since 2008, developing holes and wear. The exhibition provided the opportunity – and perhaps, funding – for both immediate care, and longer term considerations, including whether and how the work could remain on permanent display, and newly commissioned writing.
Extending the generous run of the exhibition would also allow for sustained, critical engagement with the artist and their position in postwar Britain. Beutlich, like his work, is freestanding, but his practice (and MBE) also speaks to wider questions concerning the assimilation of individuals into “British” culture without acknowledgement of their particular lived experiences.
From these works, we can consider the many European artists and designers behind Britain’s textile industries, how and why designers like Tibor Reich and Bernat Klein were woven into the fabric of society, whilst the likes of Otti (Otilija) Berger, another briefly connected with Ethel Mairet, were not. Beutlich certainly warped his own fine line, but visually, he veered closer to those who remained in their countries of birth – including Abakanowicz, but also Jagoda Buić and, especially, Mira Spirovska in socialist Yugoslavia. Further evidence can be found in the archive materials and books, which sprawl from the exhibition into the small library and permanent display.
Threads of influence
The exhibition begs a question, left hanging, about the presence and interest of his work in Poland, one advanced by the eventual donation of the Grabowski collection to the Museum of Art in Łódź and the National Museum in Warsaw. Though Beutlich relatively disengaged from his birthplace – only exhibiting there in British Council touring exhibitions, and, again, as a British artist – it is hard not to perceive the crowds of Onlookers (1997) and Queueing (1997) in light of Poland’s postwar and post-communist experiences. These little figures, made more eerie by the shadowy installation, share much in common with those fashioned by other diasporic artists like Nina Grey (Janina Gruenberg).
Ditchling Museum follows these threads with an extensive public programme, inviting visitors to make their own pajaki, chandeliers of rye straw and paper. Beyond access, these workshops reinforce the role and influence of arts and crafts in constructing national identities in Britain and beyond, as advanced in the William Morris Gallery’s 2022 exhibition, Young Poland.
A tension exists between this due to interest in his works and the individual’s right to opacity. “People ask me about the ideas in my work…but I will only talk about the technical side”, Beutlich remarked. (Like Ditchling, the GAC, for instance, practically employ his works for learning and education, through school and local authority schemes.) “I remember that Henry Moore put down a book after a few pages and said that he didn’t want writers to analyse his work”.
This reference to another postwar British contemporary, exhibited widely through Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe in shared diplomatic efforts, nevertheless grounds our engagement in the objects themselves. This exhibition embraces the plurality of his person and practice – both on and off the loom.
Written by Jelena Sofronijevic
Tadek Beutlich: On and Off the Loom
January 18 – June 22, 2025
Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, Ditchling, UK
Jelena Sofronijevic
Jelena Sofronijevic (@empirelinespodcast) is a producer, curator, writer, and researcher based in London. Their curatorial projects include Invasion Ecology (2024) and EMPIRE LINES, a podcast which uncovers the unexpected flows of empires through art. They are also pursuing a practice-based PhD with Gray’s School of Art, curating exhibitions of Balkan and Yugoslavian/diasporic artists in British collections.
Jelena works at the intersections of cultural history, politics, and the arts, highlighting continuities over time, and seeks to make complex ideas accessible, not simple. Much of their research centres on pluralising representations of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe (CESEE)/diaspora communities and cultures, particularly from the Balkans and Yugoslavia, and more constructive, contemporary histories of non-alignment. More widely, they seek to platform lived experiences and perspectives often marginalised or excluded from representation, especially in anti-colonial and environmental activism.
Jelena’s full portfolio is available on their website and Instagram.
