Art and Textiles - A selection by Lottozero

26.06 - 04.08.21

Art and Textiles - A selection by Lottozero is a group exhibition that brings together a core of artists who have been supported and represented by Lottozero textile laboratories, a research center for textile art, design and culture, founded in Prato in 2016 by Arianna and Tessa Moroder from Bolzano. The exhibition presents a wide range of possibilities to work with textile materials, through the languages of sculpture, photography, ceramics, installation and painting, carrying forward Lottozero’s exploration of the multiple relationships between textiles and contemporary art.

Among them is the research of the duo Khurtova & Bourlanges (composed of Marie Ilse Bourlanges and Elena Khurtova, respectively of Russian and French origin but both resident in the Netherlands), which exhibits a collection of “knitted fabrics” made entirely of porcelain and terracotta; handmade by working a wire of ceramic paste with large wooden “knitting needle”. The works are characterized by the presence of loose and defective weaves, an expression of the vulnerability of the human body. The “anti-flags” and the stitched and upholstered sculptures of Farkhondeh Shahroudi (Iranian artist living in Berlin since the 1990s) are instead the channels of a poetic narrative that feeds on the artist’s historical experience, of her social, personal, political and intimate dimensions.

The language of photography is present in the exhibition through different approaches and interpretations: Anna M. Rose (American artist transplanted to Florence) uses it to immortalize a series of private performative acts moved inside abandoned and uninhabited spaces, wearing an anthropomorphic envelope made of synthetic hair, body-hair which evoke a primordial and almost monstrous vulnerability. “Under Cover” by the Swiss artist Virginie Rebetez is a series that documents a funeral ritual practiced in South Africa: beyond the apparent objectivity of the shots, the folds of the fabrics and blankets portrayed in the shot, take us to a place somewhere else, with a breath of surrealist memory.

A close comparison with painting is represented “in primis” by the works of Roland Barth, an artist originally from Berlin, who since 2016 has undertaken a research that has led him to define, with the term screen-painting, a personal pictorial language that makes use of the tools of screen printing, such as the scraper and the screen-printing frame, which are also used in the printing on fabric. Robin-Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust (French artist, performer and designer living in Brussels) fuses pictorial expression and textile materiality in his textile paintings, with an unmistakable graphic sign that combines the deconstructive play of Picassian matrix shapes with the sinuous and elegant Matisse line. It is still the propensity for painting that holds together the corpus of multifaceted works of Stefanie Kägi, a Swiss artist living in Berlin. The artist interweaves materials and textile, workings with processes of digital image; analogue and digital techniques intertwine, finding in error and imperfection new formal solutions that extend the boundaries of pictorial investigation.

Two Italian names are added to the list of international artists: Claudia Losi, one of the Italian artists to have incorporated the textile medium into her work since the 1990s, and Luca Vanello, whose part of edition work “Tired Eyes Dislike the Young”, is on display, which the artist developed and produced at Lottozero between 2017 and 2019.

Lottozero is in fact a place of research and production for artists: its strategic location within the textile district of Prato, together with the fact that it has its own workshop equipped with textile machinery, an exhibition space and the possibility to host designers and artists in residence, make it a unique reality in Italy, an ideal place for all those artists who want to investigate materials, techniques, meanings and conceptual implications of textiles within their own work.

Since 2016, Lottozero has developed numerous exhibition projects in collaboration with museums and cultural institutions, including the Textile Museum in Prato, the Centre for Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci in Prato, Villa Romana in Florence and the Museion in Bolzano.

The exhibition Art and Textiles - A selection by Lottozero is the first event organized in collaboration with Vijion Art Gallery in Ortisei.

Artists:

Roland Barth (Berlino 1983. Vive e lavora a Berlino)
Marie Ilse Bourlanges (Parigi 1983. Vive e lavora ad Amsterdam)

Robin-Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust (Chambery en Savoie / Francia 1994. Vive e lavora a Bruxelles)

Stefanie Kägi (Winterthur / Svizzera 1987. Vive e lavora a Berlino)

Elena Khurtova (Samara / Russia 1982. Vive e lavora ad Amsterdam)

Claudia Losi (Piacenza 1971. Vive e lavora a Piacenza)
Anna M. Rose (Massachusetts / USA. Vive e lavora a Firenze)

Farkhondeh Shahroudi (Teheran 1962. Vive e lavora a Berlino)

Luca Vanello (Trieste 1986. Vive e lavora a Bruxelles)
Virginie Rebetez (Svizzera 1979. Vive e lavora a Losanna)