PRESENTATION: Claudia Caviezel-Caleidoscope

The colorful oeuvre of Claudia Caviezel is a visual revelation. For more than twenty years, the trained textile designer has been working in the realm of fabrics and beyond. In designs ranging from household products to international haute couture to installations in public spaces, she interweaves traditional craftsmanship with digital tools, demonstrating a flair for color and pattern.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Museum für Gestaltung Zürich

Claudia Caviezel lets herself be guided by her own creative intuition, working spontaneously, directly, and experimentally. The exhibition features textile objects, large-format prints, sketches, and recent works in order to give viewers a comprehensive look at the unique working methods of the award-winning Swiss designer. The exhibition “Caleidoscope” is the first comprehensive show of her colorful, award-winning work and promises to give visitors an insight into her distinctive style of working. Claudia Caviezel’s multifaceted oeuvre ranges from interior objects such as carpets, bed linen, and ceramics to haute couture for international labels and large-scale installations in the form of wallpapers, tapestries, and wall-hangings in the public space. Her creations are remarkable for their spontaneity and immediacy, as exemplified by her colorful, signature designs. Both qualities are a direct result of the creative process itself as well as the artist’s love of experimentation and collaboration with specialists in other disciplines. She glides easily back and forth between traditional textile crafts and digital techniques, intuitively combining colors and patterns to create vibrant, multilayered designs. As she says “Textile design is great because you can work in so many areas. Fashion, product design, architecture, interior… for wallpaper, clothing fabrics, carpets, curtains, photographs… There really is a very wide spectrum of possibilities. You can weave, print, knit, sew, pleat, glue… with all kinds of materials, in all sizes and for so many uses”. The colorful world of Claudia Caviezel is being showcased at the Toni-Areal in a space modeled on the artist’s own studio in St. Gallen. Great swathes of fabric festoon the walls, bathing them in color. Their overlapping, interweaving, and bunching together, moreover, create connections that lead visitors from one project to the next. Laid out on a long work bench are drawings, sketches, and documents attesting to each stage of the creative process. Visitors can therefore reconstruct each project from the initial flash of inspiration to the finished work of art. On show will be not just Caviezel’s seemingly inexhaustible creativity, in other words, but also her many different working methods. Another part of the exhibition is devoted to a selection of the materials from which Caviezel has drawn inspiration or that are still in her studio, awaiting their cue. Caviezel also created a number of new works especially for the show, including a fashion and interior design collection, a carpet, some ceramics and various print products. Also new is the monumental textile installation “Calliope”, which for the duration of the exhibition will adorn the large entrance hall. At 30 meters in length, this awe-inspiring work serves as both overture and coda to the kaleidoscopic world beyond.

Photo: Claudia Caviezel, Beijing, 2011, © Jonathan Leijonhufvud / Holzer Kobler Architekturen GmbH

Info: Curator: Damian Fopp, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Pfingstweidstrasse 96, Zürich, Switzerland, Duration: 1/9/2023-7/1/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-17:00, Thu: 10:00-20:00, https://museum-gestaltung.ch/