Fabric Works

‘Fabric Works’ brings together a selection of artworks by a cross generational group of artists from the gallery’s program who have used textiles to push the limits of their respective mediums. Contemporary works by Phyllida Barlow, Frank Bowling and Pipilotti Rist are displayed alongside modern masters, including Louise Bourgeois, Alina Szapocznikow, Piero Manzoni and Fausto Melotti. The painterly works on view are sewn, patched and haptic, eliciting fundamental questions about the cross-fertilization of sculpture and painting. Sculptural pieces display unconventional elements of pliability, familiarity and intimacy, challenging associations about the materiality of sculpture.

Exploring emotions, psychological states and memories, the work of Pipilotti Rist and Louise Bourgeois exists in a space between the visual and the sensual. Rist’s sculptural installation ‘Yayoi, die erleuchtete Enkelin (dunkelblau pink) (Familie Elektrobranche)’ (2022) utilizes a swimsuit lit-up from within like a hanging lamp. Focusing attention on the torso, with the fabric becoming a translucent skin, the form rounds off into the hips—an area which is believed to be a storage vessel for emotions, from passion to vexation. Rist gives this heavy area of the body a lightness by making it hollow and illuminated. Speaking on her affinity for using recycled objects, the artist says, ‘The material has stories in it already, lives from other uses, but the tradition also gives a sense of caring, paying attention, thinking twice.’

A life-long hoarder of clothes and household items, Louise Bourgeois—an artist who had an enduring connection to textile and helped pioneer the sculptural use of fabric—transformed her lived materials into art. Using cloth to draw on her own background, ‘Untiled’ (2002) harks back to her childhood in her parents’ tapestry restoration workshop with its tactility and needlework. Lying supine in a vitrine that enhances its vulnerability, the sculpture’s screaming mouth is suggestive of suffering or distress, its color evocative of a medical bandage, its stitches connoting psychological scarring. ‘I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned,’ said Bourgeois, ‘The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole.’ Interweaving her memories and emotions, the work demonstrates the artist’s desire to effect psychological repair and mend the past.