Angela Brandys. Outta Love

Outta Love documents Brandys's new series of large-scale textile works, conceived in 2024-25 and made from her own wardrobe-designer clothing torn apart, reduced to their baseline fabric, and reassembled into images drawn from the Renaissance tradition: a Venus after Botticelli, a Virgin and Child, a shepherdess after Boucher, a figure channelling Leonardo's lost Leda and the Swan. The series is presented in the exhibition at Palazzo Vendramin ai Carmini in Venice, Italy (2026), alongside works by Jenny Saville, Wolfgang Tillmans, Francesca Woodman, and others. Working from her studio in the Oltrarno, Florence, Brandys has made what she calls "covert self-portraits"-works that move between heartbreak and tenderness, between personal reckoning and art-historical conversation. An essay by art critic Blake Gopnik places Brandys's practice within the life-scale traditions of Renaissance tapestry and Florentine painting, attending to the emotional and biographical ground from which the work grows.