AVANT-GARDE TEXTILES: DESIGNS FOR FABRIC by Julia Tulovsky

Wine and cheese reception follows

Please join us for a book-signing event with Julia Tulovsky, Curator for Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art at the Zimmerli Art Museum (Rutgers University) and Tatiana Kubensky, publisher and book designer at Tatlin Press (Yekaterinburg), on the occasion of publication of Julia Tulovsky’s new book, Avant-Garde Textiles: Designs for Fabric (Tatlin Press: Yekaterinburg, 2016).

In the mid-1920s, several great avant-garde artists in different artistic centers simultaneously began explorations in fabric design. Their designs, united by striking visual similarities, put forward a new artistic language that, in principle, anticipated future experiments in modernism, in particular op art and minimalism. Avant-Garde Textiles: Designs for Fabric provides an overview of these designs and argues that the reasons for their similarities lay in common influences from visual sources and theoretical writings of the time.

Tulovsky draws special attention to work by two Russian constructivist artists inMoscow, Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova, and that of Sonia Delaunay inParis. The book analyses common features that link the artistic projects of the Russian constructivists and Delaunay, and explores how the new geometric patterns, very similar in style, were adapted to the drastically different social and economical conditions of Bolshevik Moscow and luxurious Paris of the Art Deco epoch. By the end of the 1920s, the new geometric style in textiles had grown into an international movement. The penetration of these fabrics directly into everyday life influenced people’s tastes, and prepared a firm ground for future developments in modernism.

Julia Tulovsky is the Curator for Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is a specialist in Russian art and holds her PhD from Moscow State University. Before coming to the Zimmerli, she worked at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and since 2001 has served as executive director of the Malevich Society in New York. She has published broadly on Russian avant-garde and contemporary art, both in Russian and in English.  She is co-editor of a special Russian-American issue of the Pinakotheke journal (Vol. 21-22, no 1-2, 2006), editor of Claude and Nina Gruen Collection of Contemporary Russian Art (Zimmerli Art Museum, 2008), a contributor to Moscow Conceptualism in Context (Prestel, 2011) and Sokov (Kerber, 2012), and editor of Oleg Vassiliev: Space and Light (Zimmerli Art Museum, 2014).