Sanam Khatibi
You Stretched Diagonally Across It: Contemporary Tapestry (Installation View) Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX, April 11 – October 12, 2025. Photo: Kevin Todora.
You Stretched Diagonally Across It: Contemporary Tapestry is at once a celebration of the genre and a categorical collapse, offering extended engagement with tapestry while magnifying how its contemporary practitioners are challenging the material, ideological, and narrative conventions of the age-old medium. Across works by thirty artists, the exhibition suggests tapestry as an active inflection point for unresolved inquiries into the human condition, including notions of authenticity, durational effort in the face of technological efficiency, and depictions of vastness and omniscience in physical form. The tapestries here move beyond the rigid ethnographic categorizations that have often guided the presentation of textile in institutional settings, instead reflecting circulations of people, materials, plants, and trade colors, both native and not, and identities that are temporary and contentious, or even unverifiable.
You Stretched Diagonally Across It: Contemporary Tapestry (Installation View) Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX, April 11 – October 12, 2025. Photo: Kevin Todora.
Taking its title from a letter written by Kafka, in which he imagines his father’s presence woven across a map of the world, “You Stretched Diagonally Across It” depends, like the pieces that compel it, on exceeding fixed latitudes and boundaries – between art and craft, perception and tactility, and tradition and improvisation – even to the point of unraveling. A tapestry, as posited by guest curator Su Wu, is an object in which the image and its substrate are co-arising, in a medium that often makes of gesture a devotion. In our screen-mediated contemporary moment, the exhibition offers tapestry as uniquely situated to reconsider material and temporal significance – whether it matters what our myths are made of – and the relationship between surfaces and the structures that comprise them.
Sanam Khatibi
You Taste Like Me, 2021
hand-woven wool tapestry
86 x 102 ins.
218 x 259 cm
Set in fantastical, utopian landscapes, Sanam Khatibi’s (b. 1979) atemporal and allegorical works showcase primal impulses and unrestrained animality, wherein humans and beasts have little emotional or physical distinction. Channeling magical naturalism through paintings, tapestries, and sculptures, Khatibi both exalts and cautions against the fine line between triumph and failure, peace and brutality, and ultimately, civilization and destruction. Khatibi lives and works in Paris, France. She has presented solo exhibitions at Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brazil; the Groeningemuseum, Bruges, Belgium; rodolphe janssen, Brussels, Belgium; Kunsthal Gent, Belgium; and P·P·O·W, New York, NY, among others. She has also been included in Paradise, the Kortrijk Triennial, in 2021 and The Seventh Continent, the 16th Istanbul Biennial, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud in 2019. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at Centraal Museum, Utrecht, the Netherlands; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; S.M.A.K, Gent, Brussels; UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium; Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain Occitane, Sète, France; Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseille, France; and Museum of Deinze, Deinze, Belgium, among others. P·P·O·W presented Khatibi’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, We Wait Until Dark, April 12 - May 11, 2024. Her work is currently on view in the solo exhibition The Hunger at Mendes Wood DM, Paris, France. Sanam Khatibi: Everything I Don’t Remember, the first international monograph on Khatibi’s work, will be published in Spring 2025. This comprehensive publication will feature new essays by curator Annabelle Ténèze and writer Lauren Elkin as well as an interview with the artist and art historian Katy Hessel.
Jovencio de la Paz
Blue Grid 1.0, 2024
hand-woven jacquard textiles and indigo dyed cotton
36 x 36 x 2 ins.
91.4 x 91.4 x 5.1 cm
Jovencio de la Paz (b. 1986) was born in Singapore, and currently lives and works in Eugene, OR. They received their BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL, in 2008, followed by an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI, in 2012. De la Paz has been included in group shows at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO; EFA Project Space, New York, NY; Museum of Craft and Folk Art, Los Angeles, CA; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, OR; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; The Franklin, Chicago, IL; Uri Gallery, Seoul, Korea; among others. Their recent solo shows include Cumulative Shadow, Holding Contemporary, Portland, OR; The end of rainbows, Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, NC; Some Circle, Bent Pyramids, and Warped Grids, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Objects: USA 2020, R & Company, New York, NY; among others. They have taken part in residencies at OxBow School of Art, Chicago Artists Coalition BOLT, ACRE, and more. In 2022, Jovencio de la Paz was named a United States Artist Fellow for their significant contribution to the field of craft. Their first exhibition with P·P·O·W, el lugar de los milagros / the place of miracles, will be on view May 16 – June 21, 2025.