Sasha Bowles

Classical Expositions at the Gainsborough Hotel 2023

Created by Sasha Bowles and curated by Vestalia Chilton

Hotel intervention

Vinyl, Acrylic, paint and soft furnishing

Just a hop away from the Gainsborough hotel, standing proudly in a niche on the façade of the Victoria and Albert Museum is the statue, designed by Aston Webb of Thomas Gainsborough. For this project, Sasha Bowles has taken her inspiration from the elegance of Gainsborough’s paintings and the incredible wealth of antiquities from the magnificent V&A museum. Fusing together Gainsborough’s penchant for blues and sensual figures with her own love of classical sculpture and historic artefacts, Sasha has created  luxurious backdrops for the walls of the Gainsborough Hotel interior.

Using her mischievous surrealist trademark style, Sasha cunningly manipulates images, creating new interpretations and journeys through the past. Sasha would hope that Gainsborough would have been intrigued and conceivably charmed by her reinterpretation of the past. Known as one England’s foremost  landscape painters and portrait painters, Gainsborough did not only paint directly from nature or from the model; he would create his own landscapes in the studio from broccoli, broken mirrors and coal and posed jointed dolls within them; which once known completely changes how one views his paintings. Indeed nothing is ever quite what it seems.

“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality” Iris Murdoch

Sasha has long been entranced by façade and fakery and uses a mixture of photo montage images to create theatrical installations for the viewer to interpret and become a player within. Working site specifically her aim is to interact with the context of the building, its location and vice versa. She playfully twists the narratives presented in facsimiles of environments and examines the boundaries that cross between spaces. The known becomes uncanny and challenges our engagement and interpretation of the familiar.

The lobby of the hotel welcomes guests into an environment of classical colonnades, elegant statuesque figures, and dream-like extending interiors. The lift portrays bright illustrations of birds and flowers to journey them up to room 106 - the Enlightenment Suite; where muted classical figures adorn the wall and plump luxurious velvet cushions nestle on the bed, offering the weary traveler a haven to rest in between their explorations of all that London has to offer.

THE INSTALL WITH COLOURSONIC