Fiber Art is gaining ground in the field of contemporary art. It is a concept whose translation as textile art loses nuances, because it needs to be differentiated from the traditional concept linked to applied arts, to craft or manufacturing processes in which fibers are used as material for the creation of utilitarian objects or subordinated to disciplines such as architecture. , fashion or decoration.
Contemporary textile art is something else. It is painting with thread and sculpting volumes with all kinds of textile materials. It is fabric and fibers as a matter of artistic expression, and it has its own language. Its immense possibilities have already been exploited by pioneers such as Jean Lurçat, or the Spanish Josep Grau-Garriga, one of the main promoters of the tapestry as an expressive resource of the first order in contemporary art. Or the groundbreaking Cleve Jones, with his creative activism in the eighties. But it is beginning to take hold as a differentiated artistic category.
It has its own art fairs, such as the International Biennial of Contemporary Textile Art, which in its last edition, in 2019, was held in Madrid. In 2019, the first museum of contemporary textile art in our country opened, in Sant Cugat del Vallès. Also in 2019, the first art gallery dedicated exclusively to the exhibition and sale of fiber art, “The Fibery” (Fiber Art Gallery), was inaugurated in Paris. And with Spanish participation, by the artist María Muñoz.
Textile art has been the protagonist of numerous exhibitions in recent years in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Santiago de Compostela… The Alighiero Boetti show in 2011 at the Reina Sofía Museum was a shock. And the exhibition “The Nature Spirit”. Japanese contemporary textile art that same year was his consecration.
But the confirmation of the momentum of this discipline is the number of artists, the variety of approaches, currents, techniques and results. From pure conceptual and abstract art to figurative, through hyperrealism, with techniques ranging from embroidery, with a wide range of materials and styles, through collage and mixed art, including sculpture, with classical influences, impressionism, street art, contemporary art in general.
The base is usually the same: a lot of painting and concern for ancestral textile techniques combined with the eclecticism of contemporary art and the possibilities of applying new technologies.
Cayce Zavaglia
A good example is the American artist Cayce Zavaglia (see opening photo). With a solid training as a painter, for almost two decades she has developed a career focused on embroidered portraits, with a hyper-realistic finish thanks to a technique of hand stitching -with cotton, silk or wool thread-, which reproduces the brushstroke in a prodigious way. of a classic oil. For a year now, her exhibitions have dealt with the technique and “random beauty” produced by the embroidered image on the back, and which has become material for samples and exhibitions. Her work is a fixture at the Lyons Wier Gallery in New York.
Sylvie Franquet / “Cal to prayer” (2012-2015), wool, acrylic and lurex on cotton canvas (59 x 70 cm). Detail of “La Grande Bellezza” (2013).
Sylvia Franquet
Sylvia Franquet’s powerful work epitomizes how the filter of contemporary art reinterprets one’s own cultural roots. She is a collage and multimedia artist, encompassing needlework and textile sculpture, she was born in Belgium, a historic center of tapestries. Her work materializes the most singular reinvention of the tapestry, combining classic images with punk aesthetics, the result of a rigorous investigation of historical art loaded with humor and irreverence. Currently, her work is exhibited at London’s October Gallery.
Alicja Kozlowska / ‘Banana Peel Andy’, embroidered felt sculpture; exhibition at the LAM (Lisser Art Museum) in Liesse, the Netherlands (2019).
alicja kozlowska
The Polish artist Alicja Kozlowska works in all textile fields: crochet, embroidery, artquilt, forays into the field of fashion. But the international repercussion of it has reached him with the leap from the plane to three dimensions. With a marked influence of Pop Art, she is inspired by everyday objects to create sculptures in embroidered felt, which she makes without a previous pattern, combining various materials (labels, newspapers, sheets, felt, fabric) as well as a needle and brush. Her work is exhibited at the LAM (Lisser Art Museum) in Liesse (The Netherlands) and can be found at the MADS Milano gallery in Milan.
Ana Teresa Barboza / From the series “Reading the landscape” (2016). At WU Gallery.
Ana Teresa Barboza
The work of the Peruvian artist Ana Teresa Barboza has a lot going back to the origins, the taste for crafts, the work of traditional materials combined with other current ones, such as photographic printing, and a look at ecology as a common thread. The result, a kind of landscapes under construction or deconstruction -depending on how you look at it-, images that project an extension woven with wool that she dyes naturally. A work exhibited by the WU Gallery in the latest edition of ARCO, which she quickly placed among individuals, museums and galleries in Germany and France.
Francesca Cramer / “Been out since this morning” (14 x 9 cm). All her works are hand embroidered on old postcards.
Francesca Cramer
Francesca’s technique, embroidery on small-format photography, is not unique -it is a sub-discipline in itself- but the freshness and simplicity of her work turns her works into small jewels. Behind the work of the Italian artist and designer there is a lot of craft, as well as research and intuition in equal parts. And always willing to tell a story that links the life of old postcards with a new life, full of lyricism.
Audrey Walker / “Simple pleasures: Red wine” (2014). Retrospective “Observations” at the Ruthin Gallery (Wales).
Audrey Walker
The clean work, with its deliberately simple technique, by the Welsh artist Audrey Walker is the result of a process of artistic purification that spanned many decades. Veteran and pioneer, member of the 62 Group of Textile Artists, the international cooperative of professional textile artists created in 1962 in the United Kingdom, her figurative and two-dimensional work is greatly influenced by her extensive training in drawing and painting. Based on a wide variety of fabrics (cotton, silk, organza), she draws with layers of thread in a kind of pointillist technique. In 2018, the Ruthin Gallery, in Wales, organized a retrospective to coincide with her 90th birthday. Her work is in public and private collections around the world, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
Chiachio & Giannone / “HeArt Breakers” (2015/2016). Hand embroidery with cotton, rayon and jewel effect threads on Alexander Henry canvas (1.33 x 1.73 m). “Selva Blanca” (2015), panel of a three-piece mural (4.60 x 2.85 m).
Chiachio & Giannone
Argentines Leo Chiachio and Daniel Giannone are “a couple in life and in art”. Both have artistic training. And the two embroidered, each one by his side. They have been working together since 2003, and their work is one of the most exuberant and fertile bets in Fiber Art. Their large-format embroidered works (sometimes several metres) are difficult to define. They are not technically tapestries, nor are they quilts; but it has a lot of both. On textile bases -from old cloth and brocades to synthetic textiles- they execute different embroidery techniques, sometimes superimposed, which they intersperse with all kinds of fibers, beads and tassels. His coveted work travels the world in individual and collective exhibitions, and is in Santiago de Chile’s Isabel Croxatto Galería.
José Romussi / From the “Newserie” and “HaLlo” collection.
Jose Romussi
The entire creative exercise of the Chilean José Romussi is based on experimentation with materials related to textile art, on the use of organic materials, and on a constant change of language, shapes and textures. His working method is an unstructured and free embroidery, in geometric and imperfect compositions, with a strong expressionist character. His embroidered series on old photographs or portraits, with a rebellious and contemporary discourse, are his most recognizable works throughout the world. His work is represented at the Paradigm Gallery + Studio in Philadelphia (United States).
Alice Kettle / “Riku”, detail (2011) (2.30 x 1.20 m) and “Stitch Head” (2008) (80 x 60 cm).
alice kettle
British artist Alice Kettle, a member of the 62 Group of Textile Artists and known for her large-scale textiles, is one of the leading exponents of contemporary textile art. One of the established, a sure value, one of the most represented fiber artists in international, private and public collections, with permanent work at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Her training as a painter is projected into an embroidery technique made up of tiny, imprecise and intricate individual stitches, which combine to form large bands of color on nuanced pictorial backgrounds. Her work is in Candida Stevens Gallery, in Chichester (England).
Julie Cockburn / “Moonscape” (2019), embroidery on photography, one of the works from her latest exhibition, “Telling it Slant”, at Flowers Gallery (New York) and Messums (London).
Julie Cockburn
The work of the Londoner Julie Cockburn is defined by the transformation of second-hand everyday objects (ceramic sculptures, paintings, photographs, printed paper, books) into works of art, through an artisan process that turns them into unique pieces and returns to life Her embroidered abstract geometries, with perfect shapes and stitches, have found their way into public and private collections around the world and at Flowers Gallery in New…
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