Agree to Disagree

Eigen + Art is pleased to present the exhibition Agree to Disagree by Raul Walch (b. 1980, lives and works in Berlin). Based on his fellowship at Villa Romana in Florence, Walch explores the global textile industry in his new textile installations, assemblages and the new video work using the city of Prato as an example. A large-format banner stretching across the façade of the gallery transposes the exhibition into public space. "Be patient! Calming news is on its way.’ We laugh even though the world is crashing down on us. He confronts this fragile world, which is reflected in his works, with cross-media scraps that look like a chain of quotations, but without inverted commas. Walch has been exploring textiles as a medium since his studies, but the globalised hybridity of the material in Prato and Florence resituates his work. Dressing the Wind (Prato) is a commentary on Florence, Prato and the bamboo of Tuscany. Deeply anchored in the earth, flags wave in the wind on seven-metre-high bamboo poles. The patterns and fabrics have survived the heavy rain and wind of spring. On fabrics from various warehouses in Prato – densely printed, repeating floral and colourful patterns – he continues the symbols, colours, and lines of the prints with colour prints and paintings. In this way, he transfers the industrial reproduction of the patterns back into manual labour or craftsmanship and removes them from mass production. It is a further alienation of purpose after the alienation of the workers, but the patterns thus have an afterlife and reproduce themselves. They no longer appear naked and alienated, as they did in Prato's storage or in piles in the artist's studio. The waving flags are a continuation of the fragmentation of globalised Tuscany and yet also an empathetic transfer into a protected artistic space. The exploitation and extractivist trade in Prato finds peace and is exhibited at the same time. It is one of the many works in the garden of the Villa Romana that adds a further footnote to the title of this exhibition and speaks to the tradition of textile production and its capitalist interdependence: Let's Agree to Disagree." —Jonas Tinius

Visit

Auguststr 26

Berlin, NY