MILAN — Is fabric art?

The topic has been hotly debated in art circles for decades, but evidence suggests that Textile art on gallery walls has gained momentum.

Among the most photographed artworks at last year’s Venice Biennale — overall swathed in woven and sewn art — was Igshaan Adams’ “Bonteheuwel/ Epping,” which impressed and triggered social media posting not only for its life-size grandeur but also for the intricate and overtly artisanal weaved patterns.

Although niche, the use of yarns and fabrics is winning over not just curators, gallerists, and art collectors but also artists who had built a name for themselves with other media.

On the occasion of “De Filo,” a yearlong textile and contemporary art exhibition hosted by the Linificio e Canapificio Nazionale for its 150th anniversary, WWD sat down with a crop of them, asking what textiles have added to their art practice.

Mimmo Totaro

A pioneer of Textile Art in Italy, Mimmo Totaro only acknowledged how textile art had creators and followers all over the world attending his first “Les Biennales de la tapisserie” tapestry biennale in Lausanne in 1981.

“I started in art by doing ink hatching that had nothing to do with textiles, but they soon morphed into sculptures made of nails and taut yarns, ropes and wooden slats,” Totaro said.

“Textile materials have become very important not just to me but to anyone who already toyed with fiber art. Textiles have allowed me to evoke poetry and develop life-size installations in big spaces or in the outdoors,” he said.

Channeling rationalist and abstract art, Totaro is known for his yarn-made geometric compositions that have gained him international recognition across his 30-year-plus career, including in China where he was part of the 12th Fiber Biennale at the Yunnan Museum in Kunming Shi.

Since 1991, together with Nazzarena Bortolaso, Totato has masterminded the yearly Miniartextil exhibition dedicated to textile art and held in Como, the artist’s hometown.

“I’ve been close to the fashion world by birth,” the artist said. “I was born in Como and very attached to the territory and its link with the silk manufacturing industry. I’ve worked to tear down borders between contemporary art and textiles,” he said.

Kaori Miyayama

Japanese artist Kaori Miyayama is a mixed media creative that has experimented with painting, sculpture, installations and photography, before landing a career in textile art.

Best known for combining traditional and contemporary Japanese and European techniques, she employs natural paper and silk fabrics, especially see-through silk organza, which she handprints and sews.

Floating freely when moved by air or changing their color when hit by sunlight, Miyayama’s artworks investigate the connection between audience and time, East and West and different cultures, aiming to exalt similarities and links rather than distance.

“I began my art installation production by hand-printing woodcut prints on transparent fabrics to achieve a labyrinth-like space,” Miyayama explained.

Flexibility, durability and fabrics’ ability to be expanded and transformed from two to 3D artifacts are the main technical reasons for her to embrace textile art, she said.

Miyayama graduated in cultural anthropology at Tokyo’s Keio University and has always integrated that knowledge into her art expression, aiming to unpack the spatial and perspective differences among cultures and generations.

“My background in both anthropology and art has led me to focus on the differences in perspective among cultures and generations in daily life. I research viewpoints that continue to change and move along the boundaries,” she said.

Her swatches of fabrics creating a partition when mounted inside the exhibition space reference Japanese culture. She describes them as “floating intermediate space” allowing her to “explore a multifaceted and relative perspective to discover connections rather than distances between here and there,” she said.

“Textiles are physical materials that can be perceived with all five senses, including touch, and their elements have an enduring potential for the art world,” she added.

Moneyless

Moneyless, the nickname for Teo Pirisi, is an abstract muralist who’s part of the Graffuturism international movement dedicated to urban art and who has experimented with textile installations while making a name for himself in graffiti art.

Pirisi said he first embraced textile art in 2006, recycling worn-out sweaters for an installation, and has since continued toying with the medium, which he credits, among other things, for having shaped his geometric art vision.

After graduating at the Carrara Fine Arts Academy and attending a postgraduate course in communication design at Isia in Florence, he has built a career as a graphic designer, illustrator and artist, always championing a “slow life” approach.

Voicing a critique on modern speed and pollution and aiming for a return to enjoy the beauty of simplicity, which he finds in geometric shapes and lines, Pirisi’s art is often cryptic.

“I tend to create a contrast with the surrounding environment and as my subjects are often abstract I aim for the observer to give their own interpretation,” he said.

His murals have appeared on walls across continents, in addition to galleries and museums. Ditto for his paintings on paper and fabric-rich installations.

Cristian Boffelli

Since exhibiting his first artwork in 1994, Cristian Boffelli has taken his engraved and lithography works around the world, but soon discovered that the same lines could be sketched on fabrics.

“Thirty years ago in India, thanks to a historical collector of mine, I was hosted by a textile entrepreneur and had the opportunity to work with textile printing for a few months,” Boffelli said. “The transition from paper, a medium I have always favored as I was trained as an engraver, to textile came natural to me,” he added.

No matter the medium, Boffelli seeks to develop his art on organic materials that telegraph a sense of “warmth,” as he put it. They better serve his subjects, humans and animals designed in distorted proportions that often make them hardly recognizable.

“I usually prefer materials with an imprecise finish such as linen and hemp,” he explained. “The idea of starting from an imperfect [material] is closer to my idea of [establishing a dialogue between] the real world and the imaginary world. The former is interesting because of its flaws and glitches.”

Engraving and lithography have been his preferred media as he views them as the most immediate and blunt art form, allowing no afterthoughts.

“My research is linked to the human and animal form and the means of investigation is the line, the sign,” sometimes made with threads and yarns or sketched on fabrics, he said. “The goal I pursue in my dedication to art is to investigate the symbolic line that marks the boundary between human beings and the animal world” he added.

Matthew Attard

A Malta-born but Edinburgh-based digital artist, Matthew Attard has recently added physical layers to his tech-heavy form of expression, recruiting them from the textile world.

Moving from the exploration of perception in today’s world, his artworks are based on drawings he enriches through a multimedia approach that entails the extension of the graphic line within real life spaces and the use of data and eye-tracking methods to define the subjects of his art, for example.

“Different drawing methodologies are usually adopted to blur boundaries,” the artist said, adding that threads are just a different way to draw lines.

“I am interested in relating drawing to the fact that our contemporary routine now revolves around the digital revolution, with drastic impacts on our way of living.…We are also living in an age when every interaction we have with almost any technological machine leaves a retrievable, non-physical trace,” he said.

Currently busy with a practice-based PhD research at the Edinburgh College of Arts of the University of Edinburgh, Attard has gained international visibility working for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and at the city’s Biennale for the American Pavillion.

In 2019 he was selected for the third time to be part of the “Ten Artists to Watch” exhibition at the LACMA, Los Angeles Centre for Digital Arts.