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until 12.07. | #4708ARTatBerlin | Galerie EIGEN + ART Berlin shows from 12. June 2025 the exhibition “Agree to disagree” by the artist Raul Walch.
Based on his scholarship as prizewinner of the 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 the public space.
“Be patient! Calming news is on its way.” We laugh even though the world is crashing down on us. Raul Walch confronts this fragile world, which is reflected in his works, with cross-media scraps that seem 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 has repositioned his work
Dressing the Wind (Prato) is a commentary on Florence, Prato and the bamboo of Tuscany. Deep in the earth, flags wave in the wind on seven metre high poles. The patterns and fabrics have survived the heavy rain of spring and the wind. 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, Walch transfers the industrial reproduction of the patterns back into handwork and removes them from mass production.
It is a further misappropriation after the alienation of the workers, but the patterns have an afterlife and reproduce themselves. They no longer appear naked and alienated, as in Prato’s camps 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.
Opening: Thursday, 12. June 2025, 5 – 8 pm.
Exhibition dates: Thursday, 12. June – Saturday, 12. July 2025
To the gallery
Title image caption: Raul Walch, Agree to disagree, courtesy of Galerie EIGEN + ART Berlin
Raul Walch – Galerie EIGEN + ART | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
