The Soloviev Foundation Gallery Presents Made in Tension, Opening March 12, 2026
The Soloviev Foundation Gallery is pleased to announce Made in Tension, curated by Angela H. Brown, and opening March 12, 2026. Located on the ground floor of Soloviev Group's iconic tower at 9 West 57th Street, the installation brings together selected historical works in textile from The Soloviev Foundation collection alongside modern and contemporary paintings, sculpture, and fiber art. The exhibition poses the notion of tension as both a physical making process and a framework for the conceptual enmeshment of social and artistic form.
Considering a range of cultural sites from antiquity to the present, Made in Tension examines the use and representation of textiles as a stage for technical and aesthetic ingenuity. Striking mantles woven before the rise of the Inca Empire in present-day Peru dialogue with contemporary weavings by Ximena Garrido-Lecca and Cristina Flores Pescorán, interlocking marble forms by Henry Moore, and a photograph of intertwining limbs by Elle Pérez. An Ancient Roman sculpture of cascading garments meets Kevin Beasley's fabric manipulations. Across time and space, the show unfolds a series of convergences and imprecise translations that convey thread's manifold artistic possibilities.
"It is an honor to share Made in Tension," said Stefan Soloviev, Principal of The Soloviev Foundation and Chairman of Soloviev Group. "The extraordinary range of textiles and fiber art on view paints a fascinating picture of human creativity and technological inventiveness."
The mobility of textile structures and processes challenges conventional distinctions between art and craft, revealing how seemingly unrelated media and social positions cross and intertwine. For example, a selection of patterned appliqué Kuba textiles from the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo are installed alongside a large-scale screenprinted work by Henri Matisse, who hung similar Kuba cloths on the walls of his studio to inspire his late work.
Made in Tension also features living artists who turn to traditional modes of making to address social questions in the present. For instance, Nengi Omuku transforms strips of sanyan cloth into a canvas for an oil painting, repurposing this traditional Yoruba textile to meditate on injustice in Nigeria. Ximena Garrido-Lecca weaves recycled copper thread to call attention to the use of indigenous weaving motifs in the graphic logos of multinational corporations who continue to extract the region's natural resources through mining.
Throughout Made in Tension, artistic media and lived experiences push and pull against one another like fibers under strain. A number of works make use of loom technologies, which require weavers to negotiate states of tautness and loosening in the interlocking of warp and weft. Works by Lenore Tawney, Sarah Sze, and Olga de Amaral use the loom form both to fabricate their works and to investigate relations between structure, line, and movement. In returning repeatedly to actions of fraying and entanglement, Made in Tension conceives of the curatorial process as the creation of a web of disparate elements through friction. Collectively, the included works trace a cycle of construction and disintegration: fibers twist into thread, thread stretches into a surface, surfaces are draped, fragmented and adorned, and fibers eventually break down, returning to their original state. The exhibition leverages the life of textiles to rethink political and historical tensions—to seek a textured understanding of social conflict rather than pursuing seamless resolution.
Made in Tension includes works by Olga de Amaral, Patricia Ayres, Kevin Beasley, Diedrick Brackens, weavers from the South American coast, including Chimú weavers, Ximena Garrido-Lecca, Porfirio Gutiérrez, Elana Herzog, Ade Kassim, fiber artists of the Kuba Kingdom, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, Senga Nengudi, Raúl de Nieves, Nengi Omuku, Elle Pérez, Cristina Flores Pescorán, Pablo Picasso, Ancient Roman marble carvers, Analia Saban, Sarah Sze, Lenore Tawney, and Yoruba beadworkers and woodcarvers.
The Soloviev Foundation is pleased to share its collection with the public through guided tours and exhibition viewing hours. Guests are encouraged to visit the gallery's website to reserve a time. Made in Tension will be on view from March until December 2026.
Curator Angela H. Brown is a writer and art historian and PhD candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, focusing on textiles, modern craft practices, and anticolonial pedagogies. Brown's recent writing can be found in the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Zwitscher-Maschine: Journal on Paul Klee, and e-flux architecture.
ABOUT THE SOLOVIEV FOUNDATION
The Soloviev Foundation is the charitable giving arm of the Soloviev Group, dedicated to supporting the efforts of those working across humanitarian, environmental, and educational causes. The Foundation's gifts go to both large, long-established institutions addressing global crises and concerns, and smaller, hyperlocal organizations serving the populations in need within their communities. For more information, visit solovievfoundation.org.
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