Yael Harnik: The Devil’s Cloth – In Dialogue with Michael Argov

Residency Program of the Petach Tikva Museum of Art Print Workshop

Workshop Director and Master Printer: Moshe Roas

Assistant Master Printer: Zeev Wolf Wax

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Eight objects: screenprint on cotton, hand stitching and gathering

As part of the Residency Program of the Petach Tikva Museum of Art Print Workshop, Yael Harnik focused on Michael Argov’s (1920—1982) geometric-abstract prints in the Museum’s collection. She created eight textile objects combining screenprinting on fabric with sewing and gathering manipulations, while delving into the traditions of textile printing and dyeing, including Japanese techniques. The acts offolding and gathering echo the interplay between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional in Argov’s works, which inspired Harnik’s exploration of color and the decorative-geometric treatment of textiles.

In his works, Argov stretched the relationships between form and composition, expanding the boundaries of the medium. His prints blend screenprinting with embossment, evoking the three-dimensional reliefs he made from industrial materials. Using these techniques, he examined the dynamics of color and movement in the intersection of geometric surfaces—diagonal or rounded, complete or partial—set against white, horizontal or vertical, embossed areas.

Each of Harnik’s objects consists of twenty meters of fabric, on which she printed a striped pattern, a pattern laden with a long cultural legacy. The exhibition’s English title is drawn from French historian Michel Pastoureau’s book, The Devil’s Cloth1[i]—a “cultural biography” of the striped pattern in the West from medieval times to the 20th century. In the Middle Ages, stripes were used to designate figures who were “outside the social order”—outcasts and heretics, simpletons, beggars, lepers, prisoners; even the devil himself was depicted in illuminated manuscripts wearing a striped cloak. During the revolutionary dawn of modernity, on the other hand, the model of horizontal stripes was adopted for the flags of the United States (1776) and the French Tricolor (1789), seen as a symbol of a break from the old class hierarchy headed by the king, and as an expression of the ethos of republican liberty. In the 20^th century, the striped pattern entered fashion, sport, and domestic textiles. Concurrently, it appeared on the uniforms of inmates in the Nazi concentration camps, where the stripes were tied to the paradigm of confinement, control, and humiliation. Today, a striped pattern is used by protest and human rights movements, as in the rainbow flag.

Harnik examines the striped pattern in relation to modern art concepts. By sewing and gathering the fabric, allowing concealment and exposure, the stripes transform into sculptural objects, while elements of form and color remain visible in areas where the fabric is left ungathered. Having focused on the color blue for nearly a decade—Japanese indigo, the stripes of the Jewish prayer shawl (tallit), the blues of water and sky—Harnik now explores a broader chromatic spectrum and its interactions with white, the effect of basic shapes on hue and on the perception of color, as well as the shades emerging from the gathered folds, and questions of density and compactness.

Made of cotton, each of the objects is screenprinted with stripes of a single color—red, black, pink, yellow, light blue, blue, orange, or green. Through carefully calculated, meticulous hand-stitching and gathering, she proposes a variation on Japanese Shibori—a resist-dyeing technique based on folding, sewing, and binding, producing surfaces of color in varying geometric configurations. These shapes arise from the striped pattern itself by altering the direction of the stitching, allowing Harnik to determine which stripes remain visible. Like warp and weft in weaving, when the thread is placed above the colored stripe, the white stripe becomes visible, and vice versa: when the thread is placed underneath, the colored stripe appears.

In his treatise “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” Wassily Kandinsky observed: “Form alone, even though totally abstract and geometrical, has the power of inner suggestion. […] The mutual influence of form and colour now becomes clear. A yellow triangle, a blue circle, a green square, or a green triangle, a yellow circle, a blue square—all these are different and have different spiritual values.”2 Harnik’s suspended textile works recall familiar forms—a dress, a skirt, a curtain—yet they are also sculptural entities, unfolding as a ravishing array of color and form, flatness and volume, model and image. The etymology of textile traces back to the Latin textilis, from texere, meaning “to weave,” yet it aligns with the Greek techne (tékhnē), denoting skill, craft, and art. In the same spirit, Harnik’s works embody the know-how and abstract dimension of textile, resonating with infinity and the “beautiful in itself.”

1 Michel Pastoureau, The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

2 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M.T.H. Sadler (New York: Dover, 1977), pp. 28—29.

The exhibition is supported by:
The Israel Lottery Council for Culture & Arts