Louisa

About Artist:

Norberto Nicola (1930-2007) brought an unprecedented approach to the practice of tapestry in Brazil, claiming its autonomy as an artistic language. In 1959, along with French-Brazilian artist, Jacques Douchez, he founded the Douchez-Nicola studio embarking on the research and improvement of tapestry techniques, permanently incorporating them into his artistic work. An important influence for the advancement of his investigations was the work of Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz, whom Nicola and Douchez met at the VI|I São Paulo Biennial, in 1965. Abakanowicz is known for her Abakans, title given to a series of works that the artist identified as “textile situations”, dealing with woven structures that, together, formed installations and reclaimed the non-utilitarianism of textile art.

The contact with these pieces certainly impelled Nicola to launch, in 1969, his manifesto Woven Forms – and to bring to the public, in a homonymous exhibition at Galeria Documenta, the outcome of his research. What the artist conceived of as a “woven form” is what critic Geraldo Ferraz called “carpet-object” – three-dimensional works that are not restricted by the reproduction of contours glued to the wall, but exert expressivity from their own material and structure. Thread, wool and mane are twisted and braided through the spaces created between the fabrics, evidencing gaps, divisions and fractures that are generally sewn in order to subvert the plane form. The artist finds in three-dimensional tapestry the fulfillment of his restlessness as a creator, as stated in his manifesto: “The tapestry that I seek strays away from the traditional idea of a plane representation. We created a textile object. […] The fiber and the fabric posses a volume with their own qualities of tension, elasticity, behavior, at last, a place in space.“