COVID 19, tapestry, wall-piece, wallart, wall hanging

An exceptionally large and timely tapestry: one of Noémi Kiss’s latest artworks COVID19 is a reaction to our current crisis and climate. She overlays an old salvaged rug with a facemask. The rug becomes the symbol of our existence in the crisis: confined to our homes, where we have to find well-being. The rug is a synonym for comfort and coziness, the mask on the other hand suggests the danger floating around us in the air.
?Laborious 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 of 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.

The artist Kiss has concentrated in her oeuvre on out-of-use rugs, damaged rugs or the unwanted, where she applies her artistic interventions. She is a master at creating an impressive illusion, through overpainting or cutting the rugs.