Galerie Christophe Gaillard Brussels proudly presents Textile Unravelled, a dual exhibition project that explores how materials, motifs, and everyday objects can transform our perception of the ordinary.
At the center of the project stands Claude Viallat (FR, 1936), co-founder of the Supports/Surfaces movement. For more than fifty years, Viallat has challenged the hierarchies between art and craft, between fine art and recycled textiles, between object and support. His œuvre, at once radical and sensitive, resonates here with the practices of contemporary artists who, each in their own way, transform the everyday into a space for reflection, emancipation, or poetry.
This exhibition also marks the gallery’s first participation in MAD Parcours, a Brussels event that brings design, art, and fashion into vibrant dialogue with contemporary artistic practices.
On the ground floor of the gallery, Wired Up offers an ode to textile art as a force of resistance, transmission, and liberation. Textile belongs among humanity’s oldest crafts — a utilitarian art that has developed into a carrier of identity, stories, and memory. Yet in many cultures, it was long relegated to the realm of “handwork” or “female pastime,” despite its technical sophistication, collective dimension, and expressive richness. In the 1970s, the Fiber Arts movement demanded recognition for an aesthetic often dismissed as “feminine” or “inferior”. Around the same time, Claude Viallat broke away from traditional painterly formats: abandoning the stretcher frame, working on found fabrics such as tablecloths, tents, and parasol canvases, and developing a repeated, almost obsessive shape that would become his signature. This abstract motif, often described as a “bean,” grew into a liberating gesture and a way of giving voice to the support itself.
Wired Up traces the echoes between Viallat’s approach and the practices of contemporary artists whose textile- and material-based works explore political, ecological, intimate, and collective themes. With works by Eric Baudart (FR, 1972), Amandine Guruceaga (FR, 1989), Toufan Hosseiny (BE, 1988), Lisa Ijeoma (BE, 1996), KRJST Studio (BE, Justine de Moriamé (1986) and Erika Schillebeeckx (1988), Anne Marie Maes (BE, 1955), Ceija Stojka (AT, 1933–2013) and Claude Viallat (FR, 1936). Each of them employs thread, fabric, or other materials to create powerful forms of expression, charged with memory and emotion.
On the first floor, Elevating the Everyday – Art, Design, and Fashion in Transformation, the second part of Textile Unravelled, poses a simple yet thought-provoking question: what happens to an everyday object when it becomes part of art? Does it remain itself, or does it transform into something entirely different? From Duchamp’s urinal and Warhol’s soup can to Koons’s Balloon Dog, everyday objects acquire a new status and meaning once removed from their original context and placed within the realm of art. This process of transformation is also evident in design and fashion — think of Balenciaga’s Potato Chips Bag by Demna, Louis Vuitton’s Paint Can Bag, or the mythical Birkin Bag, transformed from functional accessory into coveted fetish object.
Although such examples are not included in the exhibition, they frame the reflection that leads back to Claude Viallat. Once again, he points the way forward: by repurposing modest materials — paper, worn fabrics, neglected supports — Viallat elevates the everyday into painterly matter. Detached from their original func- tion, these materials gain a new life, with their history and texture becoming an integral part of the work.
Around him, various gallery artists revisit this threshold between function and fiction, each in their own manner: Bina Baitel (FR, 1977), Marcel Bascoulard (FR, 1913–1978), Eric Baudart (FR, 1972), Stéphane Couturier (FR, 1957), Hélène Delprat (FR, 1957), Julien des Monstiers (FR, 1983), Mimosa Echard (FR, 1986), Michel Journiac (FR, 1935–1995), Anita Molinero (FR, 1953), Leo Orta (FR, 1993), Bernard Schultze (PL, 1915–2005), Ursula Schultze-Bluhm (DE, 1921–1999), Deborah Turbeville (US, 1932–2013) and Claude Viallat (FR, 1936). They invite us to look differently. Sometimes, removing an object from its familiar context — or shifting our gaze — is enough to strip away its banality and reveal its full force.
Textile Unravelled a dual exhibition to discover in Brussels at Galerie Christophe Gaillard, from 13 November 2025 to 31 January 2026.
