Powerful Textures. Language in textiles. Exhibition from May 9 to August 16, 2026.

Tapestries have a long tradition. In the history of textiles, tapestries and textile works in space have often played a role in asserting values and identity. Textile writing can have different functions: To be surrounded by words, to be physically enveloped in them, they can comfort, instruct or reassure.

The Klingspor Museum's collection contains a unique collection of modern text carpets, at the center of which are wall-sized works by Rudolf Koch and his students, which were created in the Offenbach workshop around 1925. The deeply religious artist, who was one of the most important typeface designers of his time, searched for comprehensive ways of expressing the word of God and thus created a new genre of typeface art. From the 1950s onwards, further tapestries of scripture were added to the museum, many of which were woven in the tapestry workshop of Inge Richter and Gret Mohrhardt, which existed in Offenbach for decades and is almost forgotten today.

Because textile work is often associated with femininity, textile writing is also increasingly used in activist and feminist contexts in contemporary art. Personal stories are interwoven with politics and social criticism. Numerous loans from international artists demonstrate the range of these powerful forms of expression. New York artist Erin M. Riley, for example, processes female experiences of violence in her woven carpets, while Lise Linnert collaborated with various people involved for her large textile installation on the Utøya attack and thus actively performed mourning work. Swiss artist Vreni Spieser deals with the separation from a partner in a wall-filling textile work and Iranian-born artist Kani Kamil uses embroidery with hair to process memories of her own childhood.

A completely different aspect is shown by loans from the Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg, which were chosen as a form of expression by female psychiatric patients in the early 1920s. Complex embroideries bear witness to the intense, sometimes obsessive examination of their own world of thoughts.