Studio Pratha – Wool Gems
September 11-Â October 26, 2021
Woolbridge Art Gallery, Salita di Riva 3, 13900 Biella
Info +39 340. 2552068 IG: woolbridge_gallery
Wednesday | Sunday 10: 00-12: 30 am – 2.30 -7.00 pm
With the patronage of Biella UNESCO Creative City
After the recent appointment of Biella Città Art & Craft Unesco, Woolbridge Art Gallery hosts the Wool Gems exhibition which presents the tapestries made by Studio Pratha, a series of unique works that are placed on the border between art and savoir-faire linked to millenary tradition of Sardinian weaving. Traditional artists, together with contemporary creatives, have conceived the works of this exhibition, bringing the viewer into a mystical combination of shapes and colors.
The wool that has always linked the city of Biella becomes in Studio Pratha’s tapestries a means of expression aimed at contemporary art that draws on the sources of a well-rooted stylistic weaving tradition, inspired by historical artistic currents and open to new influences.
It is from the contamination with the current of the Bauhaus style that the All you need series takes shape, becoming a new art and revealing for the first time the soul of the work, through the experimentation of the visible warp also proposed in the other series by the artist Laura Lai.Also belonging to the All you need series, the work Thank you, a tribute to the Nobel Prize Grazia Deledda, where the Bauhaus background is enriched by a shower of letters that immediately show the difference between words, a reference to Futurism.
Retracing the history of the twentieth century, the artists of the Futurist movement – Balla, Severini, Depero – were the first to experiment and transpose designs onto fabrics. Or Alighiero Boetti, one of the best known Italian artists, together with Maria Lai, who chose to operate mainly on fabric, thus opening the doors to a new type of work, also recognized as Fiber Art.
At the beginning of the 80s this union continued and there were several Italian and international artists, such as Mario Schifano, Joan Mirò, Bruno Munari and Nathalie du Pasquier who fell in love with the artistic rendering, and wanted to see their drawings transposed on archaic and valuable techniques, such as that belonging to the Sardinian weaving.
With Studio Pratha the tapestry continues in this long and proudly Sardinian artistic tradition, revealing the preciousness of its unique works, thanks to the work linked to tradition and new collaborations with contemporary artists.
