We all have "eureka moments" in our lives, those rare instants in which we realise that something we see and discover or someone we meet may have a bigger impact in our future actions and maybe bring a genuine and positive change in our lifestyles.
A few years ago, Berlin-based artist Gudrun Leitner had one of such moments while looking at a workshop in a children's museum during which kids played with fabrics, creating a pattern. From then on she started exploring the possibilities that fabrics may have offered her to see if she could take the technique to the next level.
Her very first experiment consisted in transposing a picture of a cow from her family farm in fabric. She reproduced the basic picture of the cow in black and white with a green meadow and a green forest in the background; then she inverted and mixed the colours in a Pop Art key. She therefore disassembled and reassembled the composition, coming up with radically different versions of the same image.
Little by little, she moved onto portraits of people, creating more intricate subjects and images and, while working on her pieces, she realized that what she was making was not a simple craft, nor it could be filed under the "fashion" label even though she was employing layers and layers of different cotton-based textiles and rolls of thread, but it was art, as she also explained at a TEDX Talk in 2012.
More years passed and Leitner has now developed elaborate large-area and expressive portraits, mixing colourful fabrics and threads.
The artist usually employed her own photographs as a starting point for her artworks, portraying subjects and events with which she was connected or that deeply moved her, but, for a recent series of portraits, she took inspiration from the pictures of Austrian photographer Manfred Klimek.
Leitner has also started zooming in on the images, a technique that gives her the chance to play around with details such as the facial hairs, the eyes or the wrinkles on someone's forehead. The portraits proved really challenging since it takes Leitner up to six months to develop just one work, but she seems to have acquired a masterly knowledge when it comes to "paint" with fabrics specific features of the human face, in partcular the eyes.
While so far Leitner has always stated these are works of art and do not have connections with fashion, you can bet that, at some point, a fashion designer or a fashion house will ask her to collaborate: you can easily see this technique transposed onto a garment to maybe customise it or to create new forms of luxury suspended between art and fashion.
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