Klingspor Museum

The Klingspor Museum in Offenbach has been collecting 20th and 21st century book and type art for 73 years. In the meantime, a collection of around 85,000 artists' books, type specimens, calligraphy, posters, comics and type carpets has come together, which grows year on year. The text carpets in particular form a special collection that has hardly been collected anywhere else. The current exhibition is dedicated to these textile text works from the collection, supplemented by tapestries and other textile works by contemporary artists.

In the history of textiles, tapestries and textile works in space often play a role in asserting values and identity. Being surrounded by words, physically enveloping oneself in them, can comfort, instruct or reassure, thus hinting at different functions of textile writing. Furthermore, textile work is often associated with female labor, so that artworks in textiles in contemporary art also occur strongly in activist and feminist contexts. Writing in textiles always means an intensive connection between material and statement, between body and space and, when made, also between body and mind.

Personal stories are interwoven here with politics and social criticism.

A piece of Offenbach's history was also brought back to light during the preparations for the exhibition. A large proportion of the carpets in the museum collection were made in the tapestry workshop of Gret Mohrhardt and Ingeborg Richter, who worked in an attic room at Mainstraße 149 for many years from 1954. Both women were single after the Second World War and felt the need to earn a living for themselves and their children. Around 1952, they chose Prof. Maria Steudel's textile class at the former Werkkunstschule in Offenbach (today's Hochschule für Gestaltung) to learn weaving, spinning and dyeing, a craft that they hoped would provide them with a livelihood and work that they could manage in their life situation. The work of these women is almost forgotten today, although their carpets can be found in the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, in churches and institutions in the USA and in numerous collections worldwide.

Decades earlier, a group of students had already gathered at a similar location around the typeface designer Rudolf Koch to embroider large-format typeface carpets in the so-called Offenbach workshop from 1925 onwards, a large collection of which can also be found in the Klingspor Museum's collection today.

The exhibition shows this rare genre of textile art, which is dedicated to the formal realization of words with great intensity and devotion. The works bear witness to the belief in the strengthening power of words, which are worth wrapping oneself in and which are created with one's own hands.

Melina Brass, Daria Gonscharova, Katya Dimova, Maike Dorn, Barbara Habermann, Sandra Heinz, Karlgeorg Hoefer, Eta Ingham-Lawrie, Monika Jäger, Kani Kamil, Rudolf Koch, Eike König, Lise Linnert, Petra Ober, Werner Poeschel, Allan Porter, Helga Portig-Sitka, Herbert Post, Fritz Riedl, Erin M. Riley, Dieter Roth, Hans Schmidt, Vreni Spieser, Johanna Natalie Wintsch, Berthold Wolpe