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Manuela Klerkx
Wounded Heart: six textile works
Just a few decades ago, if you turned up at a gallery as an artist and told them you worked with textiles, chances are they would give you a pitying look, like, “Oh, but that's not a serious art form. ” or 'No, we are not a knitting circle'.
Nevertheless, since the beginning of the 20th century there have also been pioneering artists working with textiles, such as Anni Albers (1899-1994), Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) or the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994) who have since been canonised in Western art history. Who doesn’t know Bourgeois’s textile of naked female bodies with spools of thread for nipples? And who has never seen Alighiero Boetti's colourful embroideries (arazzi) made in Afghanistan with words and world maps?
Another pioneer in the field of textile art is the German Rosemarie Trockel (1952) who took a stand against the postmodern art world dominated by white men in the 1980s. By stretching wool - in monochrome or abstract patterns - over a canvas, she lifted the material and technique out of the usual context of 'knitting housewives' and emphasized the limited vision of painting of the male-dominated art world.
With her art, Trockel not only challenged the classical definition of what constitutes a painting, but also drew attention to female sexuality and the role of women in society. Another artist who has been working with textiles since the start of his career is Berend Strik, whose first solo exhibition at Fons Welters dates back to 1990, and was for a long time the only (male) Dutch artist who worked with needle and thread.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, we have seen more and more – male and female – artists working with textiles and the wide variety in techniques and meaning is impressive: from (wall) tapestries to objects, with or without appliqués, and from embroidery to open weave fabrics, the possibilities are endless.
Nevertheless, since the beginning of the 20th century there have also been pioneering artists working with textiles, such as Anni Albers (1899-1994), Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) or the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994) who have since been canonised in Western art history. Who doesn’t know Bourgeois’s textile of naked female bodies with spools of thread for nipples? And who has never seen Alighiero Boetti's colourful embroideries (arazzi) made in Afghanistan with words and world maps?
Another pioneer in the field of textile art is the German Rosemarie Trockel (1952) who took a stand against the postmodern art world dominated by white men in the 1980s. By stretching wool - in monochrome or abstract patterns - over a canvas, she lifted the material and technique out of the usual context of 'knitting housewives' and emphasized the limited vision of painting of the male-dominated art world.
With her art, Trockel not only challenged the classical definition of what constitutes a painting, but also drew attention to female sexuality and the role of women in society. Another artist who has been working with textiles since the start of his career is Berend Strik, whose first solo exhibition at Fons Welters dates back to 1990, and was for a long time the only (male) Dutch artist who worked with needle and thread.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, we have seen more and more – male and female – artists working with textiles and the wide variety in techniques and meaning is impressive: from (wall) tapestries to objects, with or without appliqués, and from embroidery to open weave fabrics, the possibilities are endless.
2 Media items ᛫ 11 Available artworks
6 Shows ᛫ 0 Highlights ᛫ 0 Recommendations
The first work that comes to mind is 'Wounded Heart' by artist Natalia Grezina, born in Crimea in 1987. A poetic work of art in which beauty and horror, love and death come together in a significant way. In her work, Grezina strives for a common language between society, the individual and nature. Using her embroidery technique she manages to combine different materials. She knows how to generate a great emotional charge in her art through the sharp contract between soft and hard materials and between different colours and shapes.
(Represented by Chrysalid Gallery)
(Represented by Chrysalid Gallery)
2 Media items ᛫ 12 Available artworks
3 Shows ᛫ 0 Highlights ᛫ 1 Recommendations
The work 'Firmament' by Emmeline de Mooij (NL, 1978) can be removed from the wall and used as a guest mattress. This immediately touches the core of De Mooij’s practice in which she searches for the lost connection between man and his/her environment. She also made three mattress covers to show that people need shelter, a 'shelter'. After all, what does 'art' mean if you have no bed and no roof over your head? With her work, De Mooij hopes to inspire people to 'gentle acts of resistance: hospitality, sleep and recovery.' For the simple reason that hospitality and the removal of fear in the unknown other is the highest form of art.
(Represented by andriesse eyck galerie)
(Represented by andriesse eyck galerie)
0 Media items ᛫ 23 Available artworks
1 Shows ᛫ 0 Highlights ᛫ 0 Recommendations
The textile objects by Antoine Peters (1981, Vorden) are as cheerful as they are telling. For example, in the work 'Together' we see a tangle of intertwined legs, as if the artist wants to say that being together is a form of being attached to each other; because even if you wanted to, we as people cannot separate from each other. In his museum-like art installations, sleeves and trouser legs, sometimes 280 metres long, fill creations that visitors can literally walk through. These 'space garments' have a disruptive effect on the viewer because, made of distorted, stretched, repeated, cropped and reconfigured garments, they cast a different view on clothing and on three-dimensional art. By taking clothing out of the usual context of a consumer item and displaying it as an 'image' in a museum, Peters not only offers a counterweight to the consumerism of the clothing industry, but also questions the meaning of both the public (the museum, a gallery) as well as the individual space (the human body and its experience in an art environment).
(Represented by Rademakers Gallery)
(Represented by Rademakers Gallery)
2 Media items ᛫ 21 Available artworks
6 Shows ᛫ 0 Highlights ᛫ 0 Recommendations
Mirjam Hagoort (Netherlands, 1961) creates constructions of paper and textile, paint and ink, graphite and yarn, wax and glass. Fascinated by the austere, minimalist structure of modern architecture, she creates abstract fabrics in which rhythm and proportions predominate. You could argue that Hagoort reduces architecture’s three-dimensionality to the two-dimensions of the 'grid' - complete with print, fraying, embroidery and all. Buildings seem to have been flattened into planes and lines; structures that have lost their functionality, lead a life of their own in the flat surface and therefore appeal to the imagination.
(Represented by Galerie van den Berge)
(Represented by Galerie van den Berge)
Petra Laaper
0 Media items ᛫ 15 Available artworks
4 Shows ᛫ 0 Highlights ᛫ 2 Recommendations
The faux leather sculptures of Dutch artist Petra Laaper refer to archetypal totem poles and obelisks as well as to sculptures by modernist and contemporary sculptors such as Jean Arp, Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois. Laaper's sculptures reflect her research into the presence of the body in space and into the different interactions, attitudes and forms it can assume: from static to dynamic, from integrated to maladaptive and from funny to moving. Laaper combines making textile sculptures with installation and performance art, which she then captures in photography and stop-motion film.
(Represented by Contour Gallery)
(Represented by Contour Gallery)