These beasties may be timorous but their textiles are not. The latest prints from the Glasgow-based studio who brought us the Kaleido Splat lampshades and Seaweed Column fabric are anything but fearful and resigned—the very opposite, in fact.

Moire Damask from Timorous Beasties

While they acknowledge that both Gerhard Gum and Moire Damask signal in some ways a return to tradition, they just as quickly pivot and undercut this sentiment.

Gerhard Gum wallcovering

In the Timorous Beasties oeuvre, These “old and familiar repeats” use technological advancements to alter and enhance familiar techniques: “traditional pattern devices are overlaid and then overlaid again with geometric moiré.” Moire Damask is thus a dizzying and dazzling display of nuanced interacting shapes, seeming to shift and supplant one another with a perspectival prestidigitation that rivals M.C. Escher.

Moire Damask detail

The twin halves of Rorschach are visible here, as are the forms of arabesque and Rococo: “a heady synthesis for a pattern-scape of shimmering beauty, a lustrous digital flow, a new damask dialect, a decorative theatre of pattern and repeat.”

Gerhard Gum offers a similar strategy of overlay and doppelgangery, but with a distinctly dissolutionist bent, in this overt homage to artist Gerhard Richter and his technique of applying inks squeegeed through a printing screen.

For me, the effect is one of beautiful, inexorable disappearance and decay, a dark and drooping downward pull, as if the ink were an entity of self creation, propelled along by its heady mass alone.

Moire Damask comes in three colorways and Gerhard Gum in two. Contact these not-so-Timorous Beasties to find out more.