Exhibitions / Retrospective — Musée de la Manufacture Bohin
Retrospective — Musée de la Manufacture Bohin
Nearly thirty years of textile portraits — 2019
In 2019, the Musée de la Manufacture Bohin, in Saint-Sulpice-sur-Risle, Normandy, devoted a major retrospective to the work of Katherine Roumanoff.
The exhibition brought together 80 works, tracing several decades of creation around the textile portrait.
Since her first figures, born from theatre costume offcuts, Katherine Roumanoff has developed a language in which textile replaces paint. Scissors become the drawing tool; patterns, colours and textures gradually build the faces.
Velvet, brocade, cotton prints and upholstery fabrics are cut and then assembled directly, with no preliminary sketch. The layering of fragments brings forth singular figures, carrying memories, emotions and inner states.
Presented in a place devoted to the history of the needle and to textile craftsmanship, this retrospective highlighted a long-term artistic research at the crossroads of textile art, outsider art, naive art and reuse.
Katherine Roumanoff's portraits do not seek to represent identifiable people. They give form to presences, fragments of self-portrait and inner landscapes. Each face appears as an assemblage of layers, mirroring what makes up a being: heritage, memories, emotions and transformations.
The exhibition was also the subject of a France 3 television report.
Musée de la Manufacture Bohin
Saint-Sulpice-sur-Risle, Normandy, France
2019 — 80 works presented.