KREFELD.- With the exhibition Marion Baruch: Social Fabric, the Kunstmuseen Krefeld in Haus Lange is presenting the work of an outstanding artist who has only started to receive long overdue recognition in the last few years. Born in Timişoara, Romania, in 1929, she studied painting in Bucharest, Jerusalem, and Rome; lived in England and repeatedly in Paris; and ultimately settled with her family in Gallarate near Milan. Baruch’s artistic work is characterized by the political and social upheavals of the twentieth century, addressing themes such as feminism, consumer criticism, and migration. She began working collaboratively at an early stage, repeatedly involving a wide variety of cultural workers in her projects and combining art, design, and everyday experiences in a highly individual way. Textiles as a material, with their many different meanings, remain a central aspect of her work.

The exhibition spans five decades. It begins with the artist’s conceptual and performative objects of the late 1960s, features design and sculptural works as well as her series created under the label NAME DIFFUSION, and finally presents her more recent pieces made from offcuts from ready-to-wear fashion, with which Baruch has become internationally known in recent years. The presentation’s focus is always on the dialogue with the architecture of Haus Lange. Designed by Ludwig Mies an der Rohe and built between 1928 and 1930 as a villa for the silk manufacturer Hermann Lange, it is still considered an icon of Neues Bauen (New Building) in Germany today. Not only does Krefeld’s textile history become a backdrop for Baruch’s works; it is also elements such as space and emptiness, restriction and unobstructed view, and interior and exterior, that define her works as they do the architecture of Haus Lange.

Marion Baruch (b. 1929 Timişoara, Romania, lives in Gallarate, Italy) and her multifaceted work, which has evolved over decades, have been receiving long overdue recognition for some years now. Baruch is interested in the relationship between inside and outside, body and space, subject and system. She is currently working with offcuts from the clothing industry, playing with the absent body and the normative. Transparency, omission, and emptiness are key features of her sculptures, installations, and actions. The presentation at Haus Lange—a place that already contains essential characteristics of Baruch’s work—is her first institutional solo exhibition in the Rhineland. The Kunstmuseen Krefeld thus pay tribute to one of the most important female positions rooted in the 1960s.

Parallel to the project in Krefeld, the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein is presenting an exhibition of recent works by Marion Baruch.

Curator: Magdalena Holzhey

Since 2017, the Kunstmuseen Krefeld have been conceiving exhibitions in the neighboring villas Haus Lange and Haus Esters that enter into dialogues with each other—between art and design, between generations, or between themes and related content. This series now continues with Marion Baruch and Anna K.E., two artists who are separated by two generations but whose approaches are linked by similar themes, including performative and participatory elements and the playful linking of art and design. Both work with the human body as an instrument of measurement and emotional stimulus.