Historical motifs, subversive strategies and staged materiality – the catalogue explores the many manifestations of handicrafts in art. In the form of a pointed dialogue between historical and contemporary positions, it draws associative parallels from the 19th century to the present day.

Whether knitting fisherwomen in the dunes or net menders at the harbour – handicrafts long played an important role in coastal life. With industrialisation, handicrafts lost their original function as a means of earning a living and at the same time established themselves as a bourgeois leisure activity. In the 1970s and 1980s, artists such as Rosemarie Trockel and Alighiero e Boetti liberated needlework from its reputation as an edifying female occupation by creating subversive and political works. Handicrafts are also experiencing a sustained renaissance in contemporary art. Transgressing social and art-historical patterns of order plays a major role in this. Abstract or representational, art or craft, female or male – positions that are not limited to textiles subvert these categories and reveal new connections.

Artists: Alighiero e Boetti, David Artz, Birgit Dieker, Otto Heinrich Engel, Julius Exner, Jochen Flinzer, Edgar Honetschläger, Viggo Johansen, Isa Melsheimer, Abigail O’Brien und Mary A. Kelly, Wilhelm Peters, Judith Samen, Yinka Shonibare, Laura Splan, Annette Streyl, Rosemarie Trockel.

Editor: Thorsten Sadowsky

Authors: Thorsten Sadowsky, Lea Heim, Martina Nommsen

Publisher: Museum Kunst der Westküste, Det Paulsen Legaat gemeinnützige GmbH, Alkersum/Föhr

Edition: Hardcover

Format: 16.0 x 23.0 x 1.5 cm

Weight: 452 g

Pages: 119

Language: German, English

Number of colour illustrations: 26

Number of black and white illustrations: 5

ISBN: 978-3-942872-02-7