'PAINTSTROKE' - wall-hanging - tapestry -wall art

'PAINTSTROKE', is a new piece by the artist Noemi Kiss, where she cuts out a salvaged oriental-style rug and overlays it with her artistic interventions.
Laboriously woven or knotted by hand, oriental rugs tell stories, interwoven in the piece. The ornaments have strong meanings. A rug can be for decorative furnishing, a symbol for paradise, and a placeholder for prayer. The artist uses this strong symbolism and marries it with the interventions of her choice, like cutting, overpainting, or gilding.
During its lifetime a rug is traded, bought, possibly resold, used over decades by various people, layering the piece with another history of usage. Foot worn carpets are witnesses of their past. One cannot simply copy them. Wear and tear, the 'Design of Time' of the rug are the basis for the artwork. Here the aesthetics are to be understood as a state of the art that cannot be produced intentionally. Such surfaces develop slowly and on their own -  through human interaction and use. Noemi is a material fetishist and let’s collide the grown with the made. She loads banal substances and materials that feel distant to art with a new meaning. The piece is an art piece from a body of work, where the artist deliberately uses old, worn-out, sometimes damaged rugs. This is her concept. The design of time is visible.
Born in Székelykeresztúr/ Transylvania, Romania, 1969. Noemi holds a Master in Architecture from the Technical University of Vienna and a Master in Philosophy from the Vienna University of Humanities. In 2011 she founded of the Viennese fashion label WIENER FETZEN. Between 2011-2013 she collaborated as the artist-Duo KISS THE REICHL. Since 2013 – she has been working on her own, as an artist on the interface between, art, design and architecture.

An architect and philosopher Kiss maneuvers with a range of materials. She re-incarnates old Persian rugs and alters them into new surprising forms, implementing new functions and structures – they can become, for instance, a table. A rug with its ornaments and patterns is loaded with strong symbolism. Let it be cut out or painted the original meaning gets a new angle. New silhouettes emerge from the surface in a strong livelihood. The insects appearing on the rugs are similarly obnoxious as worn-off rugs. Kiss provokes our senses in marrying the precious rug with the profane construction material concrete; the hard and the soft material clash and transgress into a new object.