Gruppenausstellung - Common Threads, Installationsansicht, Galerie Volker Diehl, Remise, Berlin, 2024 © Marcus Schneider
Gruppenausstellung
COMMON THREADS
kuratiert von Claudia Kudinova
Diehl Remise
Mommsenstraße 65
nach Vereinbarung
Künstler: Butrymowicz / Jacobi / Jecza / Matuszczyk-Cyganska / Owidzka / Sadley
“Fiber art was modernism protected by its process” – In the article 'Different Voices with Common Threads: Polish Fiber Art Today' published 1998 in The Polish Review, Catherine S. Amidon illustrates a crucial argument for the understanding and contextualization of Eastern European Fibre art of the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on the 'Polish school of art weaving‘ with one of its most prominent representatives Magdalena Abakanowicz, it reflects on further fibre protagonists such as Abakanowicz’s colleague Jolanta Owidzka – also opening up perspectives on other Eastern European fibre artists such as the Romanians Ritzi & Peter Jacobi.
By engaging with the fibre medium – that while charged with the notion of a folklorist ‚craft' was simultaneously protected by the very same notion – these artists were able to mediate the dictates of socialist realism of their communist regimes, that were mainly enforced among painting.
Thus, the engagement with the thread left room for aesthetic experimentation with modernist abstract tendencies through pictorial instances of material, technique, shape and color. The subversive character of Fibre art was further due to its dissociation from the male-dominated world of painting. Being mainly developed by female artists, Eastern European Fibre art of the 1960s and 1970s is however not to be understood as a specifically female art form, but as abstract interventions and experiments within a medium beside the established canon.
Deriving from this modernistic contextualization of Eastern European Fibre art the dual exhibition Common Threads at Galerie Volker Diehl, Niebuhrstrasse 2 and its show room in the Mommsenstrasse 65 gathers multiple artistic positions including prominent voices associated with the Lausanne International Tapestry Biennials in the 1960s and 1970s and beyond such as Zofia Butrymowicz, Ritzi Jacobi, Ritzi & Peter Jacobi, Jolanta Owidzka and Wojciech Sadley. Additionally, it sheds light on further fibre positions by Zofia Matuszczyk-Cyganska and Klará Biró Jecza.