Laurine Malengreau France
Overview
Based in Aubusson, the French epicenter of tapestry, Malengreau draws from one of Europe’s richest textile heritages. But her work does not dwell in nostalgia. On the contrary: she reconfigures that legacy with radical softness. Her chosen medium, Nuno Silk, fuses wool and silk through processes of heat, friction, and hand-layering. There is no weaving here. No needle. No thread. The gesture is everything — deliberate, immersive, and intimate.
Her pieces, composed on the floor, often at architectural scale, unfold like textile paintings — immersive, topographical, and elusive. They do not depict. They emanate. One senses weather, breath, vibration. Some works seem to bloom; others smolder or evaporate. The material is always present, yet never static. It becomes atmosphere.
As curators, we are drawn to the tension in Malengreau’s practice — between slowness and vitality, delicacy and resistance. There is a clear connection to figures such as Sheila Hicks, in the revalorization of fiber; to Zao Wou-Ki or Pierre Soulages, in the primacy of gesture; even to Claude Monet, in the chromatic depth and dissolution of form. And yet, her voice is unmistakably her own.
Her studio nestled in the revived Fougerolles textile manufactory, is itself a metaphor — a place where memory, process, and artistic renewal cohabit. Each work is not only a tactile composition, but a time-object: marked by the rhythm of the hand, the slowness of material transformation, and the humility of listening to what the fiber wants to become.
In a world of acceleration and visual saturation, Malengreau’s art offers a counterpoint. It asks us not to look harder, but to feel more deeply. Her pieces resist summary — they must be experienced, approached, sensed. They are what we might call, with respect and precision, embodied abstraction.
Her pieces, composed on the floor, often at architectural scale, unfold like textile paintings — immersive, topographical, and elusive. They do not depict. They emanate. One senses weather, breath, vibration. Some works seem to bloom; others smolder or evaporate. The material is always present, yet never static. It becomes atmosphere.
As curators, we are drawn to the tension in Malengreau’s practice — between slowness and vitality, delicacy and resistance. There is a clear connection to figures such as Sheila Hicks, in the revalorization of fiber; to Zao Wou-Ki or Pierre Soulages, in the primacy of gesture; even to Claude Monet, in the chromatic depth and dissolution of form. And yet, her voice is unmistakably her own.
Her studio nestled in the revived Fougerolles textile manufactory, is itself a metaphor — a place where memory, process, and artistic renewal cohabit. Each work is not only a tactile composition, but a time-object: marked by the rhythm of the hand, the slowness of material transformation, and the humility of listening to what the fiber wants to become.
In a world of acceleration and visual saturation, Malengreau’s art offers a counterpoint. It asks us not to look harder, but to feel more deeply. Her pieces resist summary — they must be experienced, approached, sensed. They are what we might call, with respect and precision, embodied abstraction.