Tapestries once had a place of honour in fine art, but that was during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Oil paintings, for a time, were viewed as the poor man’s tapestry. Now, that equation may be turning round.
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‘Tapestries serve a lot of purposes,’ said Donald Farnsworth, president of Magnolia Editions, which has produced tapestries for artists such as Chuck Close, April Gornik, Alex Katz, Ed Moses, Gerhard Richter, Kiki Smith, William Wiley and others. ‘They absorb sound and add warmth to a room.’ But can they also be taken seriously as works of art?
They are certainly priced like them. Five large-scale tapestries by Chuck Close were exhibited earlier this year at the White Cube Gallery in London and sold for $150,000 each, and the Gagosian Gallery has a show of four tapestries (‘Abdu’, 2009, above) by Richter (until 27 July) that were sold to buyers before the exhibition opened.
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