BERLIN.- What happens when a weaver stops treating fabric as something to preserve and begins cutting, scratching, knotting and deliberately damaging it instead? At Berlin's Kunstgewerbemuseum, an exhibition devoted to Sofie Dawo makes the case that destruction can also be a way of creating.
Now on view through January 17, 2027, “Sofie Dawo. Textile Experiments” brings together 22 works by the German artist alongside a selection of works on paper, offering a concentrated look at a figure who helped push weaving beyond its traditional associations with craft and decoration.
Dawo, who lived from 1926 to 2010, approached textiles with an unusually physical sense of freedom. Rather than treating woven fabric as a finished surface, she regarded it as something that could be tested, altered and even wounded. She cut threads, tied them together, scratched surfaces and intentionally damaged intact sections of cloth. At other times she introduced materials such as metal, nylon and polyester, pushing weaving beyond the limits of its familiar vocabulary.
For Dawo, those interventions were not flaws to be concealed. They were part of the work. She deliberately made room for what she called “emerging surprises” — the unexpected things that happen when an artist gives up a degree of control and allows material and process to shape the final object. Her unusual strategy has been described as a kind of refinement through destruction: the act of making remains visibly embedded in the finished work.
That attitude placed her far from conventional ideas about weaving. Dawo's works were not designed to serve a practical purpose, nor were they simply translations of drawings or pictorial compositions into cloth. Instead, she allowed structure, fiber, texture and technique to determine what each piece might become.
In some cases, the results refuse even to remain on the wall. The textiles move outward into the surrounding space, turning something traditionally associated with a flat surface into what the museum describes as textile sculpture. Dawo consciously worked “against all the rules,” abandoning established weaving conventions in pursuit of a form that could exist independently of both traditional craft and conventional painting.
Her path toward that freedom began in Saarland. Dawo studied fine art and weaving at the State School of Arts and Crafts in Saarbrcken between 1948 and 1952. Among her teachers was Boris Kleint, a former student and assistant of Johannes Itten who introduced a Bauhaus-oriented foundation course in Saarbrcken. That environment appears to have helped shape Dawo's interest in materials, structure and experimentation.
After working as a designer, largely on projects for public spaces, she returned to the Saarbrcken school in 1958 to lead its class in weaving and textile printing. She remained closely connected to the institution for the rest of her life.
Yet despite the originality of her work, Dawo belongs to a generation of women working in textiles whose contributions were for decades given considerably less attention than those of artists working in painting or sculpture. From the 1960s onward, she helped challenge the idea that weaving existed primarily to reproduce an image in another material. Instead of starting with a figurative or abstract motif, she began with the textile itself and asked what its physical properties made possible.
That distinction mattered to her. Dawo wanted to be understood as a textile artist, not as an artisan or craftsperson. Her works make clear why: thread and fabric were not simply materials used to execute a predetermined design. They were active participants in a process built around chance, resistance, experimentation and discovery.
The exhibition therefore does more than recover an underrecognized artist. It also turns Dawo's work into a way of reconsidering one of the Kunstgewerbemuseum's most persistent questions: Where does craft end and art begin?
Dawo's answer, embodied rather than written, seems deliberately resistant to the distinction. Her textiles occupy both territories while comfortably belonging to neither. They can be woven, cut, knotted, damaged, sculptural and abstract at the same time.
Seen decades after they were made, the works have lost little of their experimental character. What might initially appear to be torn threads, broken surfaces or interruptions soon reveals itself as the substance of Dawo's artistic language — evidence of an artist who understood that sometimes a material must first be disrupted before its possibilities can fully emerge.
“Sofie Dawo. Textile Experiments” is on view at the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Kulturforum Berlin, through January 17, 2027. The exhibition features 22 works by Dawo and selected works on paper, with loans from Jochum Rodgers, Berlin.
