HARD/SOFT Textiles and Ceramics in Contemporary Art

While textiles are associated with warmth and flexibility, ceramics formed from soft clay radiate a cool fragility. Yet both media bring to life an aesthetic language that shifts between hard, soft, unwieldy, and flowing. The materials, shapes, and significance of the selected works reveal a broad spectrum of ambiguity, vagueness, and simultaneity.

The exhibition showcases the work of around 40 artists from Austria and all over the globe, whose artistic practice draws on craft techniques such as embroidery, knotting, and weaving, as well as sculpting, wedging, and firing. The sculptures, installations, and painted works, which also include embroidered images, patchworks, and tapestries, show a vast range of artistic and interdisciplinary approaches that combine visual and applied arts, architecture, music, and digital space. These pieces offer an insight into production methods, ateliers, and workshops, as well as cross-disciplinary collaboration. Here textiles and ceramics hold cultural significance for communities; they have become intertwined with economic and political systems. Alongside the materials’ characteristic features, the exhibition considers feminist ideas, explorations of the body, questions of cultural appropriation as well as gender stereotyping.