THESSALONIKI.- MOMus—Museum of Modern Art—Costakis Collection in Thessaloniki, Greece presents a retrospective exhibition on the work and life of Anna Andreeva (1917–2008), the Soviet textile designer who worked in the design collective at the Red Rose Silk Factory in Moscow from the 1940s to the 1980s, under the title Collective Threads: Anna Andreeva at the Red Rose Silk Factory.

Named after the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, the Red Rose Silk Factory was a site of collective female design labor that shaped the fashion and material culture of late Socialism. The exhibition showcases the abstract, geometric, cosmic, space-age, and cybernetic patterns of Andreeva, highlighting her as an individual talent whose inventiveness often soared above the work of her comrades, and who sometimes had to find ways to elude the censoring glare of Party authorities. At the same time, the exhibition spotlights Andreeva as a successful and enthusiastic participant in the planned economy of Soviet Union during the Cold War, also displaying designs that reflected demands for popular, traditional and patriotic themes, and works made for state commissions to commemorate historic events, such as cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s first manned space flight in 1961 and the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics.

The exhibition includes Andreeva’s drawings, sketches, and historic fabric samples, as well as photographs, film clips and other documentary materials from the Red Rose Factory collective, Soviet fashion magazines and exhibitions. It is complemented by large-scale contemporary reproductions of Andreeva’s textiles that viewers are invited to touch.

The exhibition presents Andreeva’s work in dialogue with the Russian avant-garde from the Costakis collection of MOMus-Museum of Modern Art. It includes a number of textile designs from the 1920s, as well as works of art that inspired industrial design in the early Soviet years, which were preserved thanks to the tireless efforts of collector George Costakis.

The wealth of documentary materials about the Red Rose Factory, its production procedures, and Andreeva’s collaborative work with her comrades, reveal an artist whose work as part of a collective in a busy and prestigious factory allowed her to emerge both as a leader among her comrades at the Red Rose Silk Factory, and as a unique artistic voice.

The exhibition contributes to the recent intensive interest in textile and fiber art in multiple exhibitions (like “Unravel” at the Barbican 2024 and “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” which will end its current tour at MoMA in 2025) by continuing the feminist emphasis on woman makers but shifting the focus from handmade craft like weaving, embroidery and quilting, and its purported femininity, to a different model of industrial-scale textile production deliberately organised along collective lines within the Communist system.

An accompanying catalogue (publ. Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich) with historical and theoretical essays by scholars, curators and critics, also emphasises the collective process of the industrial production of textiles.

Curated by: Christina Kiaer, specialist in Soviet art history, Professor of Art History, Northwestern University, USA

Assistant Curator: Angeliki Charistou, Art historian, MOMus-Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection

In collaboration with: Anna Andreeva Estate (Basel), Layr Gallery (Vienna)