Fillingham’s latest work reclaims nostalgia, Englishness and working-class culture, volatile ideas in today’s political climate
All nine works in Peter Fillingham’s exhibition Basil Dress speak a common language of bright colour, tactility and playfulness. Assembled from found materials, their slightly faded reds, greens, blues and yellows evoke handmade children’s toys passed down from a previous generation (the artist was born in 1964) and, more widely, twentieth-century British entertainment. At the show’s spiritual centre is Fruit Salad (2025): a tweed jacket, plaid overcoat and folded trousers hung on simple but stylised steel racks. Fillingham enlivens the garments with strips of multicoloured fabric sewn onto their surfaces, black pompoms and frilly collars. These upcycled articles, we’re told, once belonged to Basil Dean, founder of the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) and grandfather of artist Tacita Dean, who here contributes a moving text discussing her friendship with Fillingham and offering her take on his sculptural aesthetic.
The ‘Basil’ in Basil Dress, Dean clarifies, alludes to a very English tradition of midcentury vaudeville. ‘Basil Dress’ was the term used for the military fatigues worn by ENSA performers who entertained British troops during the Second World War. It symbolised their contribution to the war effort – they were not just entertainers but, in a way, adjunct soldiers. The layering of meaning in a work like Fruit Salad is mirrored in how Fillingham makes the works, which – as Dean notes – combine formalism and theatricality. Here, Fillingham reclaims nostalgia, Englishness and working-class culture with generosity and wit. It’s notable that, in the current political climate, not just in post-Brexit UK, with its conflicted attitude towards Europe, but also in France where the work is being shown, these are fairly volatile ideas and themes.
Fillingham handles them with care, mobilising a camp aesthetic that draws gleefully on midcentury culture via the postwar patina of his palette and textures and even the unfashionable compositional strategies of 1970s movements like kinetic art. 8s, Helter Skelter (2025) and 17s, Strip (2025) both consist of wooden frames pierced with rods – respectively crisscrossing and laid out in a row – that are in turn each wrapped in colourful fabric. These, along with the less colourful Blackdrop (2025), which suspends rods in space at irregular diagonal angles from wires, recall kinetic artists like Carlos Cruz-Diez and Jesús Rafael Soto. Fillingham does not, however, play on perceptual vibrations between figure and ground, favouring warmth and humour over sterile scientism.
That he is an avowed Francophile, the result of a South England upbringing that included numerous cross-channel trips, also seems to drive his affinity for kinetic art – which found more favour in the postwar Parisian art scene than in other European capitals – and its tactile, participatory nature. See, here, BF,RE,FW,DJ,CG,GJ,GB,MJ (2024), an installation of white cards bearing block capital letters in coloured pen, pinned to the wall in a grid. A sign invites visitors to rearrange the letters to spell out the initials of loved ones, though the results inevitably escape Fillingham’s control. (I hung the initials of friends and family; later, someone spelled out ‘Free Palestine’.)
This work, then, rooted in the past but open to conversing with the present, does not satirise a nostalgic perspective of midcentury English culture – it embraces it, campy exuberance and all. In doing so, the artist offers viewers a way to engage with this fraught terrain more freely, liberating hoary cultural signifiers from their co-option by far-right discourse. At the same time, he gently reminds us that the image of a glorious past is, indeed, a fantasy. The reality is one of multiplicity, joyful artifice and eccentricity. Rather than polishing the English crown, Fillingham hands us a fruit salad – messy, colourful and infinitely more nourishing.
Basil Dress at Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris, 22 May – 18 July
From the September 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
