Harry Freegard has always had range. The kind of range that starts with Barbie couture made from household objects and ends—well, doesn’t end, but currently lands—with silk-draped, pastel-drenched illustrations in his debut solo exhibition, titled Gorgeous.
If you’ve ever met Freegard, seen his work, or even clocked his wardrobe, you know his aesthetic is part absurd theatre. It toes a line between silly and sublime. And with Gorgeous, he’s flipped the script: less clowning, more clarity. Same instinct. More heart. “I’ve always drawn like a crazy bitch,” he says with a laugh over our chat. “But it was never the focus. I was always told that people don’t become artists. It’s not real. You make clothes, you style, you art direct. Drawing? That’s a fantasy.”
Fantasy, though, is Freegard’s mother tongue. Raised in Wiltshire (“small town in the middle of fucking nowhere, and everyone dresses boring”), he escaped to London at 18, like so many glittering creatures before him. After graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2018 with a focus on fashion print, Freegard used the school not just as a launchpad, but as a place to sketch, scratch, sew, scribble, and build a career in art direction, styling, and brand consultancy (Chanel, Dior, Vivienne Westwood… Don’t make him name-drop any further, he’s NDA-bound). Still, drawing remained the hidden engine. “I’d draw the lookbooks, sketch the sets, map out the images. The drawing was the thing that got me the job. But it never got shown.”
Until now. Gorgeous, his debut at Soup Gallery (run by Hector Campbell), is Freegard at his most earnest. A suite of 19 works—out of over 300 he’s amassed quietly at home—stitched together from pencil, silk, pastel, longing, obsession, and a lot of mess. “My studio? An absolute car crash. Five layers deep of bullshit. But I’m soothed by seeing other artists’ workspaces look worse.”
This chaos births beauty. And vulnerability. These aren’t just pretty pictures, they’re talismans. Friends, lovers, porn stars, all rendered with reverence and sex and softness. “It’s selfish in a way,” he admits. “Like this one guy—Johnny, an Irish singer—he has the most insane nose. Catches light like nothing else. I wanted to stare at it. So I did. For hours.”
Freegard’s materials of choice, pencil and silk, mirror that split. Sharp, precise mark-making meets soft, floating layers. “There’s always destruction and reclamation. I’ll ruin a drawing, hate it, bring it back. Then I stitch silk on top. It’s instinctual. I let the colors pour out of me.”
The aesthetic, once playfully subversive and irreverent, has mellowed into something still mischievous but much more… gentle. “Before, I was twisting things, rebelling, trying to make brands laugh or gag or approve. Now? I’m just making what I want to see. I wanted to prove I could make beautiful things. Just straight-up gorgeous things.”
The show—bright, summery, rainbow-light—leans into glamour and magic and monetizing longing. “I think about alchemy a lot,” Freegard says. “The way an influencer posts an Erewhon smoothie and it buys their rent for six months? I want that too. A scribble turns into cash? That’s the dream. That’s magic. That’s Gorgeous.”
It’s not just aesthetic transformation. It’s personal too, marking a shift in how Freegard sees himself. “It took me forever to call myself an artist. Isn’t that weird? But I am. I’m an artist. I draw. That’s it.” Of course, fashion still calls but quietly. He’s still sketching for big brands behind the scenes. But there’s a certain satisfaction in going solo. “Fashion shoots? They’re so reliant on people and money. This? This is me, by myself, no assistants, no approval process. I get to follow what feels delicious.”
The art world, famously allergic to commercialism, might bristle at the idea of drawing as hustle. But Freegard makes no apologies. “I love working with brands. I love money. But this, art, is the thing right now. This is the lane. I want another solo show. I’ve got stacks of work just sitting there. Big pieces. Lots of silk. More feelings.” Still, the humor’s never far off. Like the time he showed up to a club night with toe-tentacle sculptures superglued to his feet. “Took me hours to get them off. But hey, commitment to the bit, right?”
Ultimately, Gorgeous is both an arrival and reintroduction. A soft punch to the gut. A sweet, strange revelation from a once-clown-now-artist showing us that beauty can be the rebellion. “I’d been put in so many boxes, and left out of so many, because no one knew what to do with me. So I just thought, girls, let me show you. I can make gorgeous things. Come look.” And we’re lucky we did.