Dirty Looks
We recently partnered with the Barbican Art Gallery on Dirty Looks, an exhibition exploring fashion’s relationship with dirt, decay, and imperfection. Our role encompassed the full exhibition build, including off-site fabrication, specialist finishing, and on-site installation within the gallery.
Central to the exhibition’s spatial narrative were the degradation finishes - a key design concept developed by Studio Dennis Vanderbroeck. We worked closely with SDV to realise this vision across the upper gallery bays, where surfaces transition from crisp painted finishes through distressed plaster, to pristine tiling and, ultimately, deliberately decayed tiles. The tiled surfaces were carefully matched to those on the exterior of the Barbican, materially grounding the exhibition within its architectural context and reinforcing the themes of ageing and transformation.
In contrast, the lower gallery adopts a more raw and gestural character. Here, large expanses of draped cotton canvas hang from the gallery walls, creating a softer, more tactile environment. Additional exhibition elements include bespoke scaffold structures, fabricated to suspend objects and define spatial moments within the gallery.
Alongside these material interventions, we delivered a range of bespoke display elements, including vitrines, partition walls, and plinths, with integrated lighting, object supports, and conservation measures where required. Off-site production allowed for precise control over complex finishes and assemblies, supporting an efficient on-site installation within the Barbican’s operational constraints.
Delivering Dirty Looks required a high level of material experimentation, technical coordination, and logistical planning. The project exemplifies our ability to realise conceptually driven exhibition environments where surface, texture, and material behaviour - developed in close partnership with Studio Dennis Vanderbroeck - play a central role in shaping the visitor experience.
Photography by Thomas Adank
