Hannah Ryggen, born Hannah Jönsson (21 March 1894, Malmö – 2 February 1970, Trondheim), was a Swedish-born Norwegian textile artist.[1][2] Self-trained, she worked on a standing loom constructed by her husband, the painter Hans Ryggen [no].[4] She lived on a farm on a Norwegian Fjord and dyed her yarn with local plants.[4]
Career
Hannah Ryggen was a pacifist who subscribed to Scandinavian feminist and leftist journals, and was active in the Norwegian Communist Party and international workers’ movements.[5] She paid close attention to the rise of fascism in Europe, and made work in direct response to it.
According to curator Marta Kuzma, although Ryggen "shared and affinity with Käthe Kollwitz, who also selected as her narrative the social, spiritual, and political disorder of her time, Ryggen bypassed Kollwitz's tendency to draft allegorical figures (such as Black Anna) and instead identified historical individuals who forged, installed, and enabled the totalitarian regime in those years – Mussolini, Hitler, Göring, Quisling, Churchill, and the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun."[5]
In 1936 she wove one tapestry called 'Hitlerteppet' (The Hitler Carpet), with two decapitated figures kneeling before a hovering cross, and one called 'Drømmedød' (Death of Dreams) depicting prisoners and murderous Nazis in a concentration camp.
Ryggen created about one hundred large tapestries in her lifetime. Following the formal traditions of 17th and 18th century Norwegian folk textile arts, her works combine figurative and abstract elements.
Twenty eight of her works were shown in a solo show at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1962, and she was the first female Norwegian artist to be represented at the Venice Biennale, in 1964.[6] In 2012 a selection of her woven works were included in dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel.[8]
^ abPaasche, Marit (2019). Hannah Ryggen: Threads of Defiance. Translated by Stieglitz, Katia. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN978-0-226-67469-8.