Foundation presents Rug Addicts exhibition in East London

Nick Hartwright and Mark Hanlon collaborate with “the world’s finest cutting edge artists and designers to create beautiful, limited-edition hand-knotted rugs.” Together they are Foundation, a new rug company. Foundation’s inaugural exhibition – “Rug Addicts” – opened last week at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane in East London...

Nick Hartwright and Mark Hanlon collaborate with “the world’s finest cutting edge artists and designers to create beautiful, limited-edition hand-knotted rugs.” Together they are Foundation, a new rug company. Foundation’s inaugural exhibition – “Rug Addicts” – opened last week at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane in East London (2-6 November 2012). COVER’s big Kahuna and colleagues attended the opening night, and teletyped your scribe the inside scoop. Today I unfurl the paper tape to report to loyal readers.

East End art exhibitions are normally chockers with taches, a hipster sine qua non, which along with fixie bikes appears immutable. But although the opening party was heaving, colleagues report a dearth of moustachioed men. Perhaps Hartwright and Hanlon take their “cutting edge” approach literally and have a Gillette triple edge door policy (despite this being the hairy lipped month of “Movember”)? Or perhaps they adhere to Edgar Allen Poe’s rug diktat. “A carpet is the soul of the apartment”, Poe wrote in 1840, and decreed those who flaunt shallow carpet knowledge “should not . . . be entrusted with the management of their own moustachios”. This much is clear from the Rug Addicts exhibition; Hartwright and Hanlon are superlative creative managers and impresarios of both rugs and moustachios. What more is needed?

Artists and designers represented in the exhibition include French graff artist and illustrator Alëxone :

and Pete Fowler of Monsterism fame:

For more images from the Rug Addicts collection see Lucy Upward’s feature in the current (Autumn 2012) issue of COVER.

Life would be less rich without woven floor coverings. We must have rugs and carpets especially superlative Rug Addict editions. But must we have taches? Of course, but perhaps fewer on hipsters and more on ZZ Top, bears, and Amish farmers please. DJ