Entanglements: On the role of textiles in art and society

Entanglements brings together important pioneers of 20th century art. From Käthe Kollwitz, one of the most impressive representatives of critical realism, who portrayed the plight of the weavers' guild like no other, to Hermann Glöckner, who came to abstract art through his training as a pattern draughtsman, who became an important representative of concrete art in the GDR and thus also a border crosser between East and West, Franz Erhard Walther, who turned to textiles as a performative and sculptural material in the age of conceptual art, and Rosemarie Trockel, who became famous in the 1980s with her knitted pictures. The sculptor Asta Gröting uses seemingly everyday objects and transforms them into ambiguously legible images. Renate Göritz was one of the most important representatives of collage in the GDR. Like Helga Paris, she lived in Berlin and influenced the scene there with her art. Her large-format collages are being exhibited again for the first time since 1991. The artists Judith Raum and Antje Engelmann tell very different stories with their videos. Judith Raum turns her attention to the Bauhaus textile workshop and everyday materials and focuses on the hierarchies of perception. Antje Engelmann uses her own family history to examine how the traditions of the Danube Swabians are characterised by migration and craftsmanship and interweave personal and collective memory.