In the extravagant universe of Anne von Freyburg, beauty misbehaves. Sequins, lace, brocade, and fringe coalesce into monumental textile paintings that shimmer, spill, and overwhelm the senses. These works, which the London-based Dutch artist calls “textile paintings,” refuse the restraint of modernist purity; they bleed color and texture like living organisms, expanding beyond their frames.

Through this lush embellishment, von Freyburg celebrates the “monstrous feminine”—women who, as writer Lauren Elkin argues in Art Monsters, reject the roles of muse, mother, or martyr and instead claim their unruly freedom.

It’s about being free and choosing your own path to happiness, no more fairy tales about men saving women; instead, it’s about women being the heroines in their own life stories.

– Says von Freyburg.

Painting with Fabric: The Reclamation of the Decorative

Von Freyburg was born in Velp, the Netherlands, in 1979, and now lives and works in London. Her practice occupies a fertile intersection between painting, sculpture, and craft, reviving materials long dismissed as “feminine” or “frivolous.” Historically, textile work has been relegated to the domestic sphere—seen as decorative rather than intellectual. Von Freyburg dismantles this hierarchy with gleeful precision.

I paint with materials.

– She notes.

Her studio is a Baroque theater of fabric: shiny vinyl, floral brocade, velvet ribbons, and embroidered fragments form her palette. Layer by layer, these tactile elements replace the traditional brushstroke, building surfaces that gleam and rupture with excess. The result is both alluring and unsettling—a tapestry of contradictions where the pretty turns grotesque, and ornamentation becomes armor.

Rewriting the Rococo

Much of von Freyburg’s recent work translates Old Master and Rococo compositions—particularly from artists like Fragonard and Boucher—into three-dimensional textile reliefs. Yet these are not mere homages; they are acts of rebellion.

In Soft Blush (After Fragonard, The Progress of Love: The Reverie), a woman’s body dissolves beneath a delirious cascade of pink string and glittering fringe. Her face is obscured by fabric, her elegance warped into distortion. Pop culture fragments and text bubbles interrupt the romantic tableau, puncturing the myth of the idealized woman. The figure becomes excessive, uncontainable—both a spectacle and a subversion.

Von Freyburg’s reimagined Rococo thus exposes the genre’s contradictions. Where 18th-century paintings often objectified women as emblems of grace, leisure, and sensual decorum, von Freyburg’s women seize those same aesthetics to reclaim power through pleasure. Her art revels in the very visual language that was once used to confine it.

The Monstrous and the Magnificent

Von Freyburg’s “monsters” are not creatures of horror but of liberation. In embracing excess, they defy the patriarchal logic that equates simplicity with virtue and adornment with vanity. Her art pulses with self-indulgence as self-determination. Sequins and fringe—once dismissed as feminine frills—become emblems of autonomy.

This approach situates von Freyburg within a lineage of artists—from Mickalene Thomas to Ebony G. Patterson—who wield decorative abundance as a political and aesthetic strategy. Yet von Freyburg’s sensibility remains uniquely European, drawing on the decadence of Rococo salons, the tactile wealth of Dutch still life, and the chaotic vitality of contemporary fashion.

Her pieces, suspended between sculpture and costume, feel alive—as if they might continue expanding until they swallow the room. They embody what critic Rosalind Krauss once called the “post-medium condition”: art that resists categorization, uniting craft, critique, and spectacle. calls “beautifully abhorrent travelers”: creatures that shouldn’t exist, but must.

Pleasure as Protest

Underneath the shimmer and bloom, von Freyburg’s work carries an undercurrent of irony. The same materials that dazzle the viewer also hint at the excesses of consumerism—sequins and synthetics that glitter like the detritus of fast fashion. Her art seduces, then unsettles, exposing our collective complicity in cycles of desire and waste.

But rather than moralizing, von Freyburg embraces contradiction. Her art insists that pleasure can be political, that the ornamental can be intellectual, that beauty itself can be a form of resistance.

I approached this body of work as a declaration of the love and care necessary for all of us to thrive.

– She explains.

In a world that often demands women shrink themselves, von Freyburg’s art dares to expand—to spill over, sparkle too much, feel too much. Her “monstrous women” are not warnings but invitations: to adorn, to desire, to take up space without apology.

Anne von Freyburg’s textile worlds remind us that to embellish is to exist boldly. Through thread and shimmer, she transforms excess into emancipation—proof that beauty, too, can bite.