Wall Hangings : A legacy of women in fibre art
Part I
TEFAF New York | Room 205
8 – 13 May 2025
Part II
Richard Saltoun Gallery New York
This group exhibition at Richard Saltoun Gallery New York brings together works by pioneering female textile artists featured in MoMA’s landmark 1969 survey Wall Hangings—Magdalena ABAKANOWICZ (1930–2017), Olga DE AMARAL (b. 1932), Jagoda BUIĆ (1930–2022), and Barbara LEVITTOUX-ŚWIDERSKA (1933–2019). Their monumental, powerful tapestries are presented alongside works by two younger fibre artists, Erin MANNING (b. 1969) and Anna PERACH (b. 1985), who continue to push the medium’s boundaries.
Unfolding across the gallery’s stand at TEFAF New York and its nearby Upper East Side location, Wall Hangings coincides with MoMA’s current exhibition Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, (previously at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Washington and the National Gallery of Canada), echoing the museum’s commitment to showcasing the radical potential and expansive breadth of fibre art from 1969 to today.
Wall Hangings showcases works by two prominent members of the revolutionary Polish Textile School, Magdalena Abakanowicz and Barbara Levittoux-Świderska, whose practices emerged during the 1960s and 1970s in response to the repressive ideology of their country’s then-communist regime. Both artists are now widely recognised for having elevated the tapestry tradition—long associated with femininity and domesticity—into the realm of fine art. Abakanowicz’s iconic sculptural reliefs on view, rendered in deep, flesh-toned sisal threads and horsehair—one of her signature materials—exude a raw, bodily sensuality, as seen in her recent retrospective at Tate Modern in London (2023).
Levittoux-Świderska’s dynamic, architectural textile pieces from the 1970-80s act as an ethereal counterpoint to Abakanowicz’s dense reliefs. Known for her large-scale, cascading fibre installations that take possession of light and space, we will exhibit for the first time in America, Organic Space, a five-by-three-metre undulating net-like form, which weaves through space. Her main interest, in her own words, lies in exploring ”... the interdependencies between real and depicted space.(...) I want to achieve clarity of composition, lightness and rhythm, without losing the nobility of the material along the way. I want to show what is inside and in between.”
Similarly to the socio-politically embedded works of Abakanowicz and Levittoux-Świderska, Colombian artist Olga de Amaral’s shimmering, golden textiles incorporate local techniques and materials, drawing on her South American heritage. One of the few artists from the region to gain international recognition during the Post-war period, she had a major retrospective at Fondation Cartier in Paris earlier this year.
Jagoda Buić’s tapestries often recall the serene, undulating motion of the ocean waves that surrounded her studio on the Croatian coast. Informed by her Balkan heritage and its folk art traditions, vernacular landscapes and the sea play a key role in the artist’s works as they’re evocatively translated into her large-scale installations. Included in the Tefaf NYC presentation will be one of her most important early works, Tapisserie Widow, 1968 – contrasting and interweaving sheep’s wool, sisal, and hemp, this is a highly emotive and theatrical work that reflects Buić’s background in costume and set design, its woven elements cascading down into space.
The exhibition will include a tufted sculpture Assemblage, by London-based artist Anna Perach, which reflects her investigation into the intersections of the psyche, gender, and identity through the primary medium of textiles. Perach’s sculptures thread the line between the beautiful and ornamental as well as the grotesque and eerie, challenging the boundaries between fine art and craft. Using tufting, a traditional and labor-intensive textile technique, the artist reimagines archetypes as hybrid forms that question prevailing cultural myths surrounding gender. Central to Perach’s practice is an exploration of the “monstrous” body—a concept that feminist theorist Donna Haraway uses to imagine new, counter-hegemonic forms of existence, adaptation and imagination in a fractured world.
Finally, the exhibition features sculptural hand-tufted reliefs by contemporary Canadian cultural theorist, political philosopher, and artist Erin Manning from her Tactile Series. Manning’s primarily textile-based practice is often participatory and relational, with a strong pedagogical focus. The Tactile Series stems from her ongoing work with the deafblind community, born out of a project in which she produced a series of hand-tufted carpets designed to facilitate tactile communication.
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