A set of new embroideries with a selection of older works by German artist, gathered for a specific installation: a reflection on the living space and the architectural environment.
For Isa Melsheimer, embroidery is also a medium for drawing and writing. Her exhibition is designed as a specific
installation in the Norman Foster building for which she is producing new embroidered hangings carrying
quotations from The Box Man, a novel by the Japanese writer Kobo Abe. It will also be focussing on a selection
of older works, around 24, dating from 2002 to 2009, which also express this idea of a different, hidden space,
from which come gazes that we are not aware of and which observe us. With a keen interest in architecture,
Melsheimer develops a line of thought around the living space as identified by modernist architecture and as
encountered on a day-to-day basis in the home, as well as shopping malls and the halfway places used by the
homeless. Some recent works created after press images taken during the collapse of the Archives of the City of
Cologne or other news events will be treating the subjects of instability and disappearance in our tightly
organised western world. This theme also refers back to the artist's great interest in issues to do with the
environment and collective responsibility.
Published on the occasion of Isa Melsheimer's exhibition at Carré d'art, Nîmes (France), from January to April 2010.
Isa Melsheimer (born 1968 in Neuss, Germany) questions modern architecture as much as our natural environment. She usually operates in situ. Her work straddles painting, embroidery and sculpture, and includes plants. Her work questions the complex, evolving relationship of humans with their environment. Architecture plays a central role in the work of Isa Melsheimer, more particularly the shapes and figureheads of modernism, notably Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or Le Corbusier.
