'True Colors: Textiles: motions, colors, and identities' featuring Dana Awartani and Olga de Amaral at MAXXI L'Aquila, Italy
26 May 2025
From 7 June – 17 November, MAXXI L'Aquila presents 'True Colors: Textiles: motions, colors, and identities' featuring Dana Awartani and Olga de Amaral.
The exhibition draws inspiration from and gives a voice to various traditions and cultures, reflecting the widespread interest in textiles, not only as a medium of artistic expression but also as an integral part of daily life for individuals, peoples, and cultures, representing their most intimate and profound identities. True Colors: Textiles: motions, colors, and identities' explores textiles as a language for artistic expression and the constructing narratives, spaces, and relationships. The exhibition contains works from the MAXXI collection, in dialogue with loans and new productions by international artists. Textiles take over and transform the Museum’s spaces. Performative and participatory works, immersive and site-specific installations composed of garments, fibres, and fabrics establish connections with the social context.
Dana Awartani engages in critical and contemporary reinterpretations of the forms, techniques, concepts and spatial constructs that shape Middle Eastern culture. Steeped in a multitude of historical references, especially Islamic and Arab art-making traditions, Awartani’s practice straddles continuity and innovation, aesthetic experimentation and social relevance. Spanning painting, sculpture, performance and installation, Awartani’s commitment to historically situated and locally sourced materials lends a rare sensitivity to urgent political concerns of gender, healing, cultural destruction and sustainability.
Olga de Amaral spins base matter into fields of color and weaves tectonic lines through space, unselfconsciously testing the borders between crafted object and the work of art. From the flat surfaces of tapestry through to resolutely three-dimensional sculptural forms made from fibre, the Colombian artist’s work spans more than 60 years, in turn reaching even further back to the spiritual qualities and ancient craquelure of medieval icon paintings or else the rigour and simplicity of the modernist grid, as if run through a loom.
Find out more via MAXXI L'Aquila.
Image: Dana Awartani, Let me mend your broken bones 21, 2024, Darning on medicinally dyed silk and paper, 8 pieces (27 cm x 36 cm each) © Dana Awartani, Courtesy Lisson Gallery
