EVENTS

The first international retrospective exhibition on the life and work of Anna Andreeva (1917-2008), the Soviet textile designer who worked at the Red Rose Silk Factory in Moscow from the 1940s to the 1980s, is the main narrative of the exhibition entitled “Collective Threads: Anna Andreeva at the Red Rose Silk Factory” to be presented at MOMus Museum of Modern Art-Kostakis Collection in Thessaloniki, Greece, from December 7, 2024 to April 27, 2025, curated by Christina Kiaer, professor of art history at Northwestern University of Chicago.

Named after the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, the Red Rose Silk Factory (also read in Russian as ‘Red Rose’)  was a space of collective female design that shaped fashion and material culture during the years of actually existing socialism. The exhibition presents, among other things, Andreeva’s abstract, geometric motifs with themes inspired by electricity, space and early digital technology (cyber), which highlight her as an individual talent whose ingenuity often surpassed the work of her comrades and whose ingenuity often had to find ways to escape the Party’s censorship. At the same time, the exhibition showcases Andreeva’s successful and enthusiastic contribution to the Soviet Union’s economy during the Cold War, also presenting designs that reflected the economy’s demands for popular, traditional and festive themes. On display, for example, are works for textiles created to celebrate historical events, such as the first manned flight into space by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961 and the Olympic Games in Moscow in the summer of 1980.

The exhibition includes drawings, studies and historical samples of Andreeva’s fabrics, as well as photographs, film clips and documentaries from the Red Rose factory collective, Soviet fashion magazines and exhibitions. It is complemented by large-scale contemporary reproductions of Andreeva’s fabrics that viewers will be able to touch.

Andreeva’s work is also in dialogue with the Russian avant-garde from the Kostakis Collection of the MOMus Museum of Modern Art, with a series of textile designs from the 1920s, as well as artworks that inspired industrial design in the early Soviet years, which have survived thanks to the tireless efforts of collector George Kostakis.

The wealth of documentaries available on the Red Rose Silk Factory, on the production processes there and Andreeva’s collaboration with her comrades in the collective, reveal an artist whose work in the busy and famous factory in Soviet times made her a leading figure and an autonomous artistic presence with a distinctive style. Recognizing the unique artistic value of Andreeva’s work, the New York MOMA recently enriched its collections with 12 of her works.

The exhibition contributes to the intense interest that exists internationally in art that has weaving as its subject and that has recently been shown in current exhibitions internationally (e.g. “Unravel” at the Barbican in 2024 and “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction” which will conclude its current tour at MoMA in 2025), emphasizing on the one hand the feminist emphasis on women makers, but at the same time shifting the focus from manual techniques such as weaving, embroidery and quilting and their stereotypical “femininity” to a different model of large-scale industrial-scale textile production organized as a collective within the communist system.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue (published by Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich) with texts by international scholars, curators and critics, with particular emphasis on the processes of factory production of textiles by collectives.

Curator: Christina Kiaer, Specialist in Soviet Art History, Professor of Art History, Northwestern University, USA

Co-curated by: Angeliki Haristou, Art Historian, MOMus-Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection

The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Anna Andreeva Estate (Basel), Layr Gallery (Vienna)

Supported by: Kristina Krasnyanskaya

Catalogue support: Konstantin & Victoria Yanakov

MOMus-Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection (Lazariston Monastery, Thessaloniki)