Marion Baruch: Quel che rimane del Cielo (What Remains of The Sky): Galerie Peter Kilchmann

Rämistrasse 33, Zurich

Galerie Peter Kilchmann, in collaboration with Irit Sommer (SommerContemporaryArt), is pleased to present Quel che rimane del cielo (What remains of the sky), a solo exhibition of new works by Marion Baruch (b. 1929, Timișoara, Romania). Marion Baruch is an artist whose life and work unfold across borders, languages, and artistic disciplines. Over more than six decades, she has lived and worked between Bucharest, Jerusalem, Rome, Paris, and Gallarate (Italy), engaging with social and political questions through a wide range of artistic forms. Throughout these movements, textile has remained the constant thread of her work. Often described as a pioneer of participatory art, a central figure in fiber art, and an early voice of performance-based practices, Baruch has continually reinvented her relationship to fabric, studying it, wearing it, producing it, collecting it, recomposing it, and ultimately articulating it into space.

The works brought together in this exhibition illustrate the latest phase of Baruch’s work, developed since 2012, when she began collecting discarded textile leftovers from clothing manufacturing companies in Gallarate (Italy) and its surroundings. Rather than making permanent alterations to the material, the artist shapes the fabric offcuts generated by the industrial process only through her gesture and the force of gravity, shaping their voids and silhouettes – on the wall on in space – into unexpected configurations. What was once a residue of industrial production destined for disposal becomes, in her hands, the basis for a language in between sculpture and painting that reveals the poetic potential of what remains.

Across her research, Baruch moves freely between cultural references, memory and languages – she speaks seven. This reflects on the titles of the works: whether they are in German, Italian, English or French, they reveal the nature of the compositions. Often wordplays or neologisms, these are expressions that are difficult to translate; when moving from one language to another, something is always lost. Bringing together fragments of textile and language, Baruch creates new semantic constellations in which meaning emerges in the empty space, in what remains between words, materials, and forms.

“The machines that produce these wonderful ready-mades follow a precise programme designed to clothe the body, not to create an artistic piece. The artistic composition, the plastic poetry, is revealed through my act of salvaging these invisible scraps and rescuing them from the trash.” 

Marion Baruch, Personal notes, 2012