RUGGED / FALTE
WALL HANGING / TAPESTRY

by Noémi Kiss, Austria 2022

SIZE: H: 414 x W: 325 cm // H: 13' 7.38" x W: 10' 7.95"
MATERIAL: overpainted, re-purposed oriental style rug
UNIQUE PIECE

EXHIBITED: RUGGED in Museum Show: ‘Seeing with your feet - the carpet in contemporary art’, Museum Villa Rot, Burgrieden, Germany, 27 Feb - 22 May 2022

A huge and impressive wall hanging by the master of manipulating salvaged oriental sytle rugs, Noémi Kiss.

RUGGED is an artwork, where twisted folds are visually applied to a repurposed rug serving as the canvas. The folds are painted in a surprisingly realistic manner creating an optical illusion. One of the hallmarks of the artist Noemi Kiss is creating trickery, wit, confusion, wonder and often a timely (social) critique with her artworks.

Through overpainting the rug Noemi Kiss creates this fascinating optical illusion of a twisted, rugged rug.

The artist Kiss has concentrated in her oeuvre on out-of-use rugs, damaged rugs, or the unwanted, where she applies her artistic interventions. She is a master in creating an impressive illusion, through overpainting or cutting the re-purposed oriental rugs. Laboriously woven or knotted by hand, oriental rugs tell stories, interwoven in the piece. The ornaments have strong meanings. A rug can be decorative furnishing, a symbol of paradise, or a placeholder for prayer. The artist uses this strong symbolism and marries it with interventions of her choice, like cutting, overpainting, or gilding.

During its lifetime a rug is traded, bought, possibly resold, used over decades by various people in various locations….layering the piece with another history of its usage. Foot-worn carpets are witnesses of their past. One cannot simply copy them. Wear and tear, this 'Design of Time' of the rug is a vital part and the basis for Noémi's artworks. Here the aesthetics are to be understood as a state of the art that cannot be produced intentionally. Such surfaces develop slowly and on their own - through human interaction and use. Noémi is a material fetishist and she lets collide the grown with the made. She loads banal substances and materials that feel distant from art with a new meaning. RUGGED is an art piece from a body of work, in which the artist deliberately uses old, worn-out, sometimes damaged rugs.