Soft and Powerful with Soul

This exhibition is dedicated to a long-time in the art world marginalized medium. Already last summer, when designers with outsider artists presented extraordinary designs during the Outsiderwear Festival in Amsterdam, this medium moved into the center of attention. In a way based on it, this exhibition explicitly highlights the artistically free handling with textiles. Although other media are more represented in the art world, some artists deal with textiles in significant ways.

The works selected for this exhibition provide insight into the diversity in the handling of textiles. There are several techniques on display: it is sewn, knitted, drawn, and fabrics, threads, and other materials are used in collages, and old material is upcycled. The use of prefabricated textiles with their colors and patterns forces the artists to work intuitively. Fabrics can be stiff, coarse, soft, and fragile. They are palpable, can scratch or flatter the skin.

Just a view on the material can trigger associations. Many of the participating artists, such as Naomi Schupper or Lavina Ngoesmin, have reinterpreted used clothing, and through their creations they bring back life to the leftovers. It can sometimes be a struggle, to accept the given, to include predetermined structures, and create something new. In this process, the artists have developed idiosyncratic objects, which detach from the origin. This development can sometimes take months.

The use of textile materials and techniques allows strong expressions, which go beyond the two-dimensional, and the flexibility of the material makes them strongly haptically appealing. They can also be wearable, such as the fanciful and seemingly from another world coming created suits by Splitter Splatter, who will demonstrate their wearability during an event at the gallery. The exhibition will open to the public from 23 October.

With Lotti Duinker | Angelique Gijsbertse | Lavina Ngoesmin | Naomi Schupper | Nahid Mia | Splitter Splatter