Green Room Exhibition

Three nearly identical blankets are placed in three nearly identical vitrines in three nearly identical exhibition rooms. One of the blankets comes from the Weltkulturen Museum’s ethnographic collection. It was part of a donation in 1834 and was given to the museum in 1904. It is made from tightly woven duck and goose feathers. The design and technique of this rare Californian blanket are repeated – with alterations and variations – in all of the fourteen feathered Californian blankets known to be in existence today.

Two further blankets in the Green Room exhibition are copies commissioned by Willem de Rooij. They are made of camelhair and, in turn, echo the feathered blanket as well as each other. The ethnographic object is spatially sandwiched between its two replicas.

Willem de Rooij has incorporated hand-woven tapestries in his work for over six years. He produces these with Ulla Schünemann, whose workshop near Potsdam, which was established in the 1920s, still uses three hundred year old looms. For Willem de Rooij, these various tapestries connect and cement the different strands within his work. Each new version adds to the growing syntax of the series and becomes part of a family of works.

Willem de Rooij (*1969, NL) is Professor of Fine Arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. De Rooij represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennial in 2005. Major solo exhibitions include Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2010), Kunstverein München (2012) and The Jewish Museum, New York (2014).