Galerie Maria Wettergren is delighted to announce that the MUDAC, Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts, Lausanne, has acquired the wall tapestry, Light Reflection IV, by Danish textile artist, Grethe Sørensen. In her Light Reflection tapestries, emerging from the artist’s personal experience with city light after nightfall in Tokyo, Sørensen transforms the Nippon metropolis and its busy traffic lights, into soft, pulsating dreamscapes. Their ample, semi-circular lines and vibrating colors on dark backgrounds derive from headlights and traffic lights, reflected on an aluminum wall plate on the side of one of Tokyo’s bustling roads. Fascinated by the rich and ever-changing patterns and colors of light, Sørensen first recorded the scenes in video together with her partner, film director Bo Hovgaard, before meticulously translating the pixels of light into subtle patterns of woven threads on a Jacquard loom at the Tilburg Textile Museum in The Netherlands.

Recognized worldwide as a pioneer in the field of art weaving in association with the digital world, Sørensen transposes optical light phenomena, both natural and artificial, into the sphere of textiles. The two contrasting worlds of immaterial light and dense textile, intertwine and fuse in Sørensen’s soft wall tapestries, creating mesmerizing visions of both an ephemeral and timeless character. Although her weavings take their starting point in video recordings, they reveal themselves to be singularly different at a closer distance. The woven pixels create a vibrant illusion of three-dimensionality, in which light is modulated into soft, nebulous reliefs through the artist’s virtuoso use of various types of threads.

GRETHE SØRENSEN
Light Reflection IV
2021
Jacquard Weaving. Trevira CS, Wool, Viscose, Cotton
167 x 200 cm
Unique piece