The Web of Fabric

Cristina David & Ana-Maria Machedon, Simona Runcan, Iulia Toma, Mădălina Zaharia

31.01.2019–16.03.2019

We are delighted to invite you on Thursday, 31st of January, starting 7 pm, to the opening of the group show “The Web of Fabric”.

The exhibition brings together works created by artists from the gallery’s portfolio in connection to the textile material, conceived as medium, raw matter, reticular volume and surface, topic or subject. The selection of works is not bound by the limitations inherent to the technical criterion, but presents approaches that are characteristic to each of the artists’ practice, in a net of various means and media interlaced around and in extension to the web of the fabric as a generative principle for structures, textures and images.

Cristina David (b. 1979) and the architect Ana-Maria Machedon (b. 1979) have been collaborating in artistic projects with a significant interdisciplinary side since 2012. In 2017, Ana-Maria Machedon has designed for Cristina David a living environment, a site-specific installation of pink polychloroprene cloth, organically integrated inside the space of the group show “Stopover: Ways of Temporary Exchange” at Frei_raum Q21, Vienna. Cristina David lived inside this genuine “apartment” throughout the entire duration of the exhibition, as an act orientated towards switching the focus and the space received by an artistic object to that of the artist’s own person and existence.

In Simona Runcan’s (b. 1942 – d. 2007) case, the work of representing the textile material in two dimensional techniques, by rendering in drawing, engraving or painting the texture of the fabric, the light, volumes and balance between textile objects built by herself, can be traced to her artistic practice in series such as “On Adornments”, “The Principles of Equilibrium”, “Silent Cohabitations”, “Interiors”. Her enduring interest in this medium can be linked to her fashion design creations in the U.A.P. (Romanian Artists’ Union)’s “Fondul plastic” in the ‘70s and ‘80s, to her professional experience inside two Parisian fashion houses between 1981-1983 and to her didactic activity in the Fashion Department of the National University of Arts Bucharest from the ‘90s.

For Iulia Toma (b. 1974) the fabric is the main medium employed both in her artistic practice and in her teaching activity inside the Arts and Textile Design Department of the National University of Arts Bucharest, as well as a primary study in mixed media projects, installations, videos or performance, inside an approach that transgresses the traditional apprehension of the textile medium in itself. In Iulia Toma’s works, this flexible, soft, apparently frail surface supports and interweaves in its fabric sensitive issues of the geo-political realities, feminist topics, problematic matters of the contemporary social context. The textile collages created in the past two years, with drawings embroidered by hand on second-hand cloth or cloth woven by her, present hieratic iconographies of the anonymous or unknown women that have fought for their rights or for other various causes in recent history.

Mădălina Zaharia’s (b. 1985) works unfold in space like theatrical performances, with an abstract scenography onto which the artistic processes from the backstage are visibly inscribed. They interpret a conceptual script which leads to a final outcome at the encounter of art, design and discourse. In her artistic practice, the visual investigation of the virtual transformation of matter starts from the digital plan and gradually amasses material layers in works that combine various means and media, from photography, digital images, different types of engraving, to metal or plastic objects and mixed-media installations.

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The exhibition can be visited until 16 March 2019, Wednesday to Saturday, 12-18, or by appointment outside the visiting hours.

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Exhibition view, photo credits: Cătălin Georgescu
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