Harry Freegard:

Gorgeous

Harry Freegard

Install Overview

Soup Gallery

exhibition review by Farah Maktari

photos by Soup Gallery

Harry Freegard

'Peter', 2025,

Silk, pencil, pastel, maker on paper,

Soup Gallery

Harry Freegard

Install Overview

Soup Gallery

A calm and soft space is formed as you enter Soup, with the blue eyes of each portrait staring back at you through the haze of colours and florals coming to life.

In the energetic joy of mark making, ‘Gorgeous’ at Soup debuts Freegard’s first solo show, inviting you into the intimate space of collage and design that wields an energy of vulnerability and play. 

Harry Freegard (b. 1995) is a British artist with a successful career in the fashion industry, having worked with brands such as Balenciaga, Chanel, Dior, and Vivienne Westwood. He entered the scene after graduating with a BA in Fashion Design from Central Saint Martins in 2018, with a disarming sense of humour that captured attention and with an undeniable British-kitsch charm throughout his career.

Gorgeous takes on a more meditative and affectionate tone than Freegard’s fashion practice with a series of 19 collages, bringing together fine art and design through drawing and textile collages.

He creates an energetic presence in each artwork with the speed and rush of emotions found through the collage's materiality, as its medium gravitates from paper to fabric you can see that sense of thinking, play, and discovery in the process just even from the raw and untrimmed outlines of each piece being visible while encased in the wooden frames.

Harry Freegard

'Rugby', 2025,

Silk on paper,

Soup Gallery

Harry Freegard

'Josh, (II)', 2025,

Silk, pencil, pastel, on paper,

Soup Gallery

Harry Freegard’s open and automatic approach forms a dialogue with the intimate depiction of the human experience

and the commercial rush of the fashion industry.

Rugby, an abstract collage, brings this to light. The work is made of muted blue and mint green silk stripes in floral patterns that dance across your eyes. He captures the exalted essence of sportsmanship and its rejoiced unity through referencing the striped uniform of rugby blazers. The curves of the textiles resemble the dynamic movements and shifts of a rugby field, emphasised by the raw seams and threads remaining uncut.

The floral patterns throughout this show are an ode to Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography, whilst also drawing on aspects of British culture and history – particularly the Arts and Crafts Movement – as floral patterns echoes into the value of craftsmanship and creating through its materiality and design.

Freegard calls upon layers of fashion, design, commerce, and domestic environments through each piece, creating a shapeshifting image of the human experience.

He brings a calm yet bold presence to life by showing the intimate human connection in a playful and vibrant lens.

His approach to collage enabled each element to maintain its own autonomy and integrity, while also interlocking to create not just an image of emotion but a sense of narrative.

Olly, one of the many portrait collages in this show, depicts the innate vulnerable desires Freegard explores as you encounter each portrait.

Harry Freegard

Install Overview

Soup Gallery

There’s a moment of quiet as you approach the portraits, holding an intimate and spiritual sense of warmth or softness, you feel in recollection of a loved one.

Each portrait has a dreamy, nostalgic tone created by the pencil colours blending and blurring. Within the show, Freegard borrows colours from paper banknotes to bring a commercial nuance to a nostalgic experience. Intertwining a social external object with internal vulnerable emotion, as he uses this colour scheme to illustrate portraits of those dear to him.

Harry Freegard

'Olly', 2025,

Silk, pencil, pastel on paper,

Soup Gallery

Harry Freegard

'Paul', 2025,

Silk, pencil, pastel on paper,

Soup Gallery

Harry Freegard

Install Overview

Soup Gallery

With Olly, the vibrant yellow and pink silk floral patterns dance along the pencil, sculpting his face. The haze of the pencil blurring the colours, especially around the eyes of each portrait, evokes a rush of emotions through this movement, making their eyes soulful and confronting, in similar vein to Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas gaze of the younger child, you are drawn to staring at her and fall into a thoughtful wonder of their life.

Freegard doesn't just draw with energy but with passionate and hopeful strength that brings figures and patterns to life, inviting you into his world.

Whirlpool, the poster for the exhibition publication, brings an element of language, showing how Harry Freegard’s fashion and fine arts narratives interlink. The poster features a sense of urgency using a violent cold yellow and grey. The publication presents perfume, a poem Harry wanted to showcase, and it embodies a thoughtful kind of thoughtlessness that allows you to follow a journey of experiences. It gives you space to reflect through this piece and consider the visuals it evokes.

From his previous work, whether through his magazine or his graduate show, there’s a sense of pushing for an image and encouraging people to resonate with it. I found this publication to be a beautiful addition to the artwork: it, in a similar way, embraces vulnerability and lets you take home a piece of that train of thought. 

Harry Freegard

'Scooter', 2025,

Silk, pencil, pastel on paper,

Soup Gallery

Harry Freegard

'Josh (IV)', 2025,

Silk, pencil, pastel on paper,

Soup Gallery

Harry Freegard

'Ladurée', 2025,

Silk on paper,

Soup Gallery

Harry Freegard

'Oscar', 2025,

Silk, pencil, pastel on paper,

Soup Gallery

Harry Freegard brings visual depth to his practice in fashion and now fine art, as his all-encompassing skill to bring out desire, humour, and an honest and raw take brings a refreshing perspective.

The process of creation is centre stage for each art piece, as its tones of nostalgia and familiarity are formed by the warmth and vibrancy of colour and domesticity through layers of floral patterns and portraits that gaze into your soul. 

Harry Freegard

'Spiky pink thing', 2025,

Silk on paper,

Soup Gallery

Harry Freegard

'Wash away slinky blue', 2025,

Silk on paper,

Soup Gallery

There is something very instinctual and beautifully human about his work, a playful unravelling that continues to grow.

Gorgeous Harry Freegard is exhibited at Soup from 19 June to 19 July 2025

Harry Freegard

Install Overview

Soup Gallery

Thank you, Soup Gallery, for providing photographs for this article. 