Marion Friedmann Gallery

SYNAPSE tapestry

Synapse tapestry - wall piece - artwork. cut-out re-purposed salvaged oriental style handknotted rug


‘SYNAPSE’

tapestry - WALL HANGING

by Noemi Kiss, Austria, 2014

MATERIAL: cut-out, salvaged, re-purposed oriental style handknotted rug
SIZE: L 326 x H 204 cm // L 128.34 x H 80.31 in

UNIQUE PIECE

 
 

This wall piece is a stunt in the making as it is hand-knotted and cut out. A task not easy to accomplish as the knots and the rug fall apart.

The artist Kiss has concentrated in her oeuvre on out-of-use rugs, damaged rugs, or the unwanted, where she applies her artistic interventions. She is a master in creating an impressive illusion, through overpainting or cutting the re-purposed Persian rugs. Laboriously woven or knotted by hand, oriental rugs tell stories, interwoven in the piece. The ornaments have strong meanings. A rug can be decorative furnishing, a symbol of paradise, or a placeholder for prayer. The artist uses this strong symbolism and marries it with interventions of her choice, like cutting, overpainting, or gilding.

During its lifetime a rug is traded, bought, possibly resold, and used over decades by various people in various locations….layering the piece with another history of its usage. Foot-worn carpets are witnesses of their past. One cannot simply copy them. Wear and tear, this 'Design of Time' of the rug is the basis for the artwork. Here the aesthetics are to be understood as a state-of-the-art that cannot be produced intentionally. Such surfaces develop slowly and independently - through human interaction and use. Noemi is a material fetishist who lets the grown with the made collide. She loads banal substances and materials that feel distant to art with a new meaning. The piece is an art piece from a body of work, where the artist deliberately uses old, worn-out, sometimes damaged rugs.

 
 
 
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