Gert-Jan Akerboom - DE (ink drawing) pdf
In the ink drawings selected for the Strich & Faden presentation at the Berliner Kunstsalon art fair, Dutch artist in Berlin Gert-Jan Akerboom skillfully uses his ink drawing technique to research the morbidity of national symbols like flags, home soil, monuments and fortifications, suggestive of the current discussions of national identity.
Peeter Allik - EST (linocut/lithoprint) pdf
The masterful linocuts of Estonian artist Peeter Allik explore Europe's traditional values, murderous ideologies and not quite so innocent folklore. The work is traditional in appearance, refreshingly sarcastic in tone.
Walter Bruno Brix - DE (embroidery) pdf
Cologne based Japanese textile craft expert/curator/restorer Walter Bruno Brix is also active as artist, and has created an extensive body of work in embroidery/applique, in which he uses art historical, often religious, themes.
Ulrich Diezmann - DE (painting) pdf
Adopting traditional genre painting, like landscape and horse painting, without the usual tong-in cheek attitude of postmodernism, Diezmann explores their value, and skillfully invests these types of painting with a contemporary sensibility.
Rinaldo Hopf - DE (painting) pdf
Hopf makes a journey through German history by appropriating youth culture images from various era, which are silk-screened on corresponding historic fabrics. In a creative process of wistful thinking and empathy, Hopf places his own image as a youth among them.
Severija Incirauskaite-Kriauneviciene - LT (embroidery on scrap metal) pdf
Severija Incirauskaite-Kriauneviciene takes pleasure in things that are only insignificant details to most people. Urbane concepts of beauty and utilitarian things inspire and form the basis of her work. Placing kitsch in a new context allows her to reveal her personal experience and point of view.
Garth Johnson - USA (recycled collector's plates) pdf
Strich & Faden II presents recycled overpainted Hümmel collector's plates by Garth Johnson, the Eureka, CA based writer, artist and tireless hyperactive educator known for his "raging craft problem". His website, Extreme Craft is a "compendium of art masquerading as craft, craft masquerading as art and craft raising its middle finger".
Ai Kijima - USA (quilted collage) pdf
"Ai Kijima was born and raised in Tokyo, attended high school in Wisconsin, and currently lives in New York City. She tirelessly combs through thrift stores for novelty fabrics and combines them with timeless vintage fabrics. The result is an impeccably crafted narrative that has both humor and depth." - Garth Johnson, Extreme Crafts 2008
Charles Krafft - USA (sculpture/ceramics) pdf
After years toiling as "the oldest promising young artist in the Pacific Northwest," Charles Krafft became known internationally in the 90's for subversive works in clay that were among the first to invest craft objects with serious and sarcastic content starkly contrasting with their perceived image. In Strich & Faden, Krafft presents new work made of bread as well.
Charles Krafft undermines the ethnocentrism and traditionalism of craft objects to comment on "resurgent regionalism", war, politics and disaster. The way Charles Krafft eschews the usual careerism in the arts and finds alternative ways, is just as radical and political, as is the choice of influences: 60's comix, and the aesthetics and themes of Industrial-, surf- and custom car cultures.
Astrid Küver - DE (knitting, painting) pdf
At first glance Astrid Küver's work may seem fragmented until one learns that much of it is inspired by recycling the discarded vintage homely materials she finds at flea markets or is given to her by friends. The artist's hand-knitted works from the "AK Bildausschnitt" series - a large and growing work group started in 2000 - are highly genital. Küver takes the heroic high art posture of Fontana and reshapes it in a feminine, yet even more in-your-face sexually aggressive way. The way design, material and theme interact remains interesting and hilarious with each new piece. 
Küver's works often evoke a sense of domesticity, that even remains present in the many outdoor scenes of her melancholy "Second Hand Holidays" travel painting series. Maybe it's because these ambitious conceptual "Heimatbilder" were painted after a personal slide collection, meant for home enjoyment. They document the holidays of a German person in the 50's through 70's, a pre-globalization era in which folkloric assumptions were very different from now.
Nava Lubelski - USA (embroidery) pdf
The artist is known for her witty, stylistically elaborate feminist parodies of the classic drip painting, in which she plays with the contrast between male/female and action/reflection. Lubelski invites us to reflect on the cultural meaning of the stain and mending, and woman's relation to it.
Musk Ming - DE (drawing)
Berlin-based Chinese artist Musk Ming skillfully uses historical styles taken from Maoist propaganda and vintage Chinese popular culture and, subversively twisting their inherent heteronormativity, invests them with his own exploration of the rich but currently suppressed queer Chinese culture and history.
Natasza Niedziolka - DE (painting) pdf
Berlin-based artist Natasza Niedziolka takes the designs and patterns of Eastern European folklore fashion as the basis of her compositions and faux-primitive wooden sculptures, the Peacock Towers.
The genius incongruous coupling of traditional naif colors and compositions with punk painterly execution and sensibility adds up to vibrant and surprising work.
Sharon Pazner - IL (papercutting/shaping)
The models Pazner made during her training as an architect - using a single folded piece of cardboard - allowed her to create stable designs quickly, using very little glue. The opposing process of undoing three-dimensional shapes also caught her imagination, and she has since followed both directions in her work. It is these two seemingly conflicting processes that these works seek to capture and suspend in an integrated whole.
Leaving the three-dimensional shapes or objects attached to the paper while exposing their cut-out origins suggests the co-existence of the finished work together with the process of its creation, something static and something in motion. The fragility of paper is an essential element of this dynamic, a delicate material further weakened by cutting while strengthened by shaping.
David Rios Ferreira - USA (gouache painting) pdf
Blending folklore with personal narrative, Ferreira's drawings and videos explore the construction and deconstruction of self, drawing upon the hybridity of culture, ethnicity, language
and sexuality.
Johanna Schweizer - NL (fiber sculpture) pdf
Johanna Schweizer is often - lazily - described as the Dutch Louise Bourgeois. This may refer to the surrealist aspects of her work; her perseverance and consistent vision; or the long time it took for the world to catch up with her work.
The artist's extensive collection of crocheted fiber sculptures is both profound and witty, it alludes to a wide array of themes, from cross-genderness and cross-speciesness; to religious suffering and sexual ritual. Folkloric, pagan, and fairy tale elements are incorporated as well, the sensually playful and the deadly serious going hand in hand.
Hunter Stabler - USA (paper cutting) pdf
Hunter Stabler creates delicate multi-layered hand-cut paper compositions of elaborate patterning and religious/mythological symbols. His work involves a formal play between the illusion of space, actual physical shadow, and the flat two-dimensions of the paper.
Sztuka Fabryka - BE (street-art/social sculpture) pdf
While most Street-artists are obsessed with appearing "urban" and in rehashing the same old hip hop cultural "urban" themes end up looking quite suburban, Sztuka Fabryka brilliantly breaks through the restrictive and tired ideology of Street-art by going rural, introducing traditional, regionalist, folkloristic and even religious themes and designs.
Tulip Enterprises - NL/DE (over painted vintage porcelain)
In their Ceramixed Plates, the artists take vintage porcelain plates as their canvas, overpainting them with sexual or political imagery.
Hiroki Otsuka - USA (drawing, painting) pdf
In his drawings and paintings, New York-based Japanese artist Hiroki Otsuka applies intriguing gender twists to his uninhibited explorations of sexuality. The artist is making an elegant transition from Manga to fine art without losing any of his cult appeal. November 28 - December 22, 2009, Kunstraum Richard Sorge shall present "Everything to More," Otsuka's first solo show in Europe featuring drawings and murals.
Georg Weise - DE (painting) pdf
After over painting fleamarket "Heimatbilder" for part II of the Strich & Faden exhibition, in the drawings presented at the Berliner Kunstsalon, the Berlin painter variates his themes of Heimat and recycling, presenting austere landscapes, painted on old used GDR wallpaper.
September 22 - 27, 2009, Humboldt Umspannwerk, Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg.
Check out oour good press article at the Tagesspiegel newspaper.
