This installation was on display from 5 to 28 April 2022 at the Pays de Mauriac media library. It retraces ten years of explorations by artist Sabine Cibert into a single motif from a work by Karl Hermann Haupt (1904-1983), a student from the Bauhaus school in Weimar.

Using an eclectic set of textiles, collected over the course of several decades, Sabine Cibert arranges sample squares 3- to 6-cm in diameter to explore colour and vibrations within the various weaves. After learning time-honoured quilting techniques and honing them for forty years, she now assembles textile fragments to create compositions spanning 4 to 10 square metres, in a contemporary twist on classic tapestry. She has invented a personal vocabulary to explore vibrations in scale and how colour and fabric work together. Each piece has been composed over time, patiently, painstakingly, completely by hand, adopting an almost meditative approach.

Moments series

The Moments series was inspired by photographic experiments by Bauhaus student Karl Hermann Haupt, an advocate for the constructivist movement. He produced Farbstudien, literally “studies in colour”, in which he juxtaposed straightforward coloured squares separated by perpendicular black lines. Inspired by a montage of 2.8- x 5.5-cm photographs that depict a road slicing through a snowscape, the duplication of which achieves a herringbone effect, Sabine Cibert retains the principle of repeating the motif and its mirror, and introduces colour and varying block orientation, thus fuelling the work with vibrations and light. Each block of 13 by 21 squares features an all-embracing chromatic palette as well as a huge variety of textile weaves, to produce a pixellated effect, as if diffracted, an echo that propagates and bounces off in all directions.

The assemblage of the various layers of textiles using quilting techniques adds yet another dimension, other lines of force, like a dynamic 3-dimensional Farbstudie, achieved by the textile’s material being.

Semagrams series

As for works in the Moments series, the Semagrams reprise the lines of force in a photo collage by Karl Hermann Haupt, a student at the Bauhaus school in Weimar.

In comparison to other works in the Moments series that these works logically follow on from, both the colour palette and format have been reduced, producing an augmented visual effect. More vibrant, the compositions with their criss-cross red, blue and yellow lines seem imbued with tension. Central to the composition, two complete drawings from the original block are surrounded by ten partial blocks, suggesting a fuller deployment of the design. The off-centre, concentric quilted spokes enhance the dynamic effect and hold the three layers together.

Thomas Leveugle
commissaire d’exposition