Pacita Abad
WALTER HAEFNER FOYER, KUNSTHAUS ZÜRICH
19 November 2024 – 1 June 2025
Kunsthaus Zürich present a selection of Pactia Abad’s ‘trapunto’ paintings in their prominent Walter Haefner Foyer. On her extensive travels, Abad found her roots in the realm of textiles. Although she saw herself primarily as a painter, she was fascinated by ‘trapunto,’ an old Italian quilting technique. She embellished padded and stitched canvases with pearls, buttons, sequins, stones, shells and fragments of glass to give her works a sculptural dimension. Between 1981 and 2000, Abad created the large-format ‘Masks and Spirits’ series, which incorporated everything from African masks to Nepalese and Tibetan thangkas. Her ‘trapunto’ paintings, which are chiefly distinguished by their vibrant colours and accumulation of materials, bring together images and experiences from a range of cultures, economies, and histories, and underline the strong influence exerted by the supposed ‘primitive’ art on Western modernism.