Textile, Silk Banner Yellow Window, 2013

Dutch designer Nicolette Brunklaus is known for her evocative use of photographic imagery in the creation of unique products and interiors. Her designs deploy a complex interplay between surface and depth, texture and image, opacity and transparency. Scenes are abstracted and colors manipulated to created soft environments with a suggested, but elusive, narrative. Blond Curtain, for example, from the Museum’s collection (2013-51-1-a,b), pairs an image of long, silky blond hair with a velvet surface texture and a two-panel design that enables us to part the hair to reveal…? For this series of silk panels she used photographs of windows, many with an ochre glass vase in the foreground. She paired these barely-there images with precise digital inkjet printing technology, to explore the full range of subtlety possible in the rendering of transparent colors. By applying the imagery to lightweight silk, the suggestion of the movement of curtains in gentle breezes is re-introduced into the work, evoking intimate memories from our own pasts.

Textile, Silk Banner Yellow Window, 2013; Designed by Nicolette Brunklaus (Dutch, b. 1959); Netherlands; silk; H x W: 298.5 × 130.8 cm (9 ft. 9 1/2 in. × 51 1/2 in.); Gift of Nicolette Brunklaus; 2019-16-1