STOCKHOLM.- Andréhn-Schiptjenko presents I Will Sew Up All the Petals of Your Garden, the first solo exhibition in the Nordic region by French-Moroccan artist Amine Habki (b. 2000, Nantes). A recent graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Art de Paris-Cergy, Habki belongs to a new generation of artists exploring and reformulating contemporary representations of masculinity.
Through a practice that traverses painting, sculpture and textile design, Habki investigates the interplay between absence and presence. By allowing the archetype of the classically masculine, dominant figure to recede, he opens space for a softer, more vulnerable and emotional physicality. His colourful textile works, often incorporating embroidery and found objects, become vessels for stories of identity, desire and belonging, rooted in his French-Moroccan heritage.
Habkis installations, composed of soft materials such as fabric, wool and thread, foreground tenderness while challenging male conventions of virility and performance. Drawing from Oriental motifs, Italian Romanticism and contemporary expression, he develops a visual language rich in symbolism and metaphorwhere vulnerability becomes resistance and presence emerges from absence.
I Will Sew Up All the Petals of Your Garden presents eleven works in mixed media, primarily embroidery with elements of painting and a single framed drawing. It unfolds as a contemplative, interior garden, a landscape where bodies are porous and permeated by emotion. The bodies are in rest, fall silent, erode and transform into vegetation no longer beings inhabiting the world but rather the world passing through them. Here, the flower is not merely a motif; it breathes, remembers, bleeds and desires. Evoking the work of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich, the flower becomes a memory of place, love and exile, while simultaneously resonating with European Romanticism, where nature reflects human passions.
Also inspired by the French poet-sculptor Tony Colombes collection of poems Some Flowers, Habki establishes a dialogue between sensuality and fragility, where the flower becomes a language of intimacy, making visible what trembles, fades and persists. Habkis sewn compositions, drawing on the ornamentation of Islamic art, branch into living patternsarabesques, shoots, fragments of skin and petalswhere body and plant merge, breathing as a single, fragile, infinite phrase.
I Will Sew Up All the Petals of Your Garden invites the viewer into a poetic meditation on touch, slowness, care and the interplay of body and landscape.