Sonia Delaunay 'Avant-Garde Costume Design' 1923 Exhibition Poster

This poster carries one of Sonia Delaunay’s 1923 costume designs: flat, interlocking planes of bold colour built for a body in motion under stage light. The black and yellow forms are pure Delaunay — geometric abstraction treated as something to be worn and moved, not only hung.

Delaunay refused the line most people draw between fine art and applied art. Alongside her paintings she made textiles, book bindings, theatre costumes, a Citroën painted to match a coat, and a whole boutique of ‘simultaneous’ fashion built from the same colour theory as her canvases. The 1923 costume designs belong to that world. They were created for Tristan Tzara’s Dada play Le Cœur à gaz (The Gas Heart), staged in Paris that July, for which Delaunay produced a celebrated set of cardboard and fabric costumes that turned the performers into moving abstract compositions.

Born in Ukraine and settled in Paris, Delaunay developed with her husband Robert the theory of ‘simultaneity’, the principle that contrasting colours alter one another in the eye of the viewer. She applied it identically to a canvas, a dress and a shopfront, insisting all three were the same artistic act. In 1964 she became the first living woman to be given a retrospective at the Louvre, recognition for half a century spent dissolving the hierarchy between art and design.

Our poster imagines a 1990s exhibition at Sofia Rinaldi Fine Art in Edinburgh, a gallery whose programme sits at the meeting point of fine art and design. The typography is spare and contemporary, letting the costume’s colour blocks command the page.

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