Thread... an exploration with textiles and thread.
The exhibition brings together the practice of Swiss artist Matthias Spiess with Nidhi Khurana and Priya Ravish Mehra, whose exploration of thread as a medium has brought them together.

Matthias Spiess | Nidhi Khurana | Priya Ravish Mehra
present an exhibition of their recent work, an exploration with textiles and...
Thread

Curated by Julia Libertad
On view: 5th - 13th October, 2014
Preview: 4th October - 5:30 pm onwards
Gallerie Romain Rolland Alliance Française de Delhi 
72 Lodhi Estate, New Delhi - 110003

This exhibition brings together the practice of Nidhi Khurana, Matthias Spiess and Priya Ravish Mehra, three artists whose exploration of thread as a medium has brought them together. Swiss artist, Matthias Spiess came to India for a residency funded by Christoph Merian Stiftung/IAAB, and facilitated by Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council in 2012/13. Matthias was able to spend six months in Lajpat Nagar, where he made the acquaintance of Nidhi Khurana and Priya Ravish Mehra, both artists working with textiles in unique ways. They discovered they shared similar artistic approaches expressed through different media and a common interest in re-interpreting traditional design and in recycling discarded materials. The thread linked their practice and helped them develop new work in conversation with each other.

According to Cas Holmes, a well known textile artist, 'reusing found materials is a form of alchemy'. The artists use this alchemy to express their artistic research and to connect with one another, finding a line that unites them to their practices and learning from backgrounds, geographies, mediums and preoccupations, each of them bring forth in their formal dialogue with one another. Despite this not being a 'hands-on' co-production, this exhibition can be considered a collaborative project due to their sharing of ideas and experiences during the time they spent together in Delhi. Spiess, Mehra and Khurana expose a genuine creation: the materialization of space for intellectual connection.

During his residency, Matthias was influenced by the role of textiles in Indian culture and decided to incorporate it into his, until then purely geometrical representations, reimaging patterns in combination with traditional Indian techniques.. Nidhi Khurana uses the insignificant katran thrown away by most tailors and designers to create maps of real and imagined spaces, mapping her experiences and those of others she encounters, while Priya's work revolves around the use of distressed textile pieces and the idea of repair through the ancestral practice of darning (rafoogari). Linking together these three artists is the thread; embroidered, darned, stitched in grids, piecing together what is left behind by others, and making new with old.

About Matthias Spiess
Matthias Spiess grew up in Basel, Switzerland. He studied at the École Supérieure d'art visuel in Geneva. He now lives and works in London and Basel and has exhibited in Switzerland, Sri Lanka, France and the UK among other countries.

Many of Spiess's paintings loosely refer to architecture. He creates and develops illusionistic spaces which are reminiscent of stage designs. He studies urban surfaces, collects architectural fragments and combinations of colours from which he extracts and abstracts geometrical forms. His complex structures grow additively, layer after layer. For many years, he has used colour in a very restrained manner to create his labyrinths and explosions of space.

During his six-month residency in Delhi in 2012/13, Spiess radically transformed his approach. He cut up his paintings and recomposed the pieces confronting his stern compositions with new experimentations. He also put together his fragmented paintings with works of art found at markets in Lajpat Nagar, the Delhi neighbourhood where he stayed. The rich art history and the contemporary art scene in India had a profound influence on his work during this residency. Taking inspiration from artists he met and starting to combine his art with traditional Indian techniques such as textile art, blockprints and embroidery, Spiess also filled his, until then, empty spaces with life. True to Indian form, he considerably enlarged his colour palette, radically redeveloping his work.