Nadine Altmayer

Nadine Altmayer (Metz, 1956) is a French artist who trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Angers and now lives and works between Paris and Anjou. She describes herself as a weaver: it is weaving, rather than painting or sculpture, that forms the foundation of her entire practice, and it is from this craft that she draws her vocabulary and techniques.

Her method always begins with a construction and moves towards a controlled destruction. On a woven warp or on recycled materials, she applies dyes using acrylic or Indian ink, then covers the surface with liquid clay which, as it dries, stiffens the fabric and sets its folds like a second skin. Then comes the reverse process: armed with a sander, she attacks this crust in places, wears away the material, tears, sews and patches it up, until what the previous layer had buried reappears in fragments. Nothing is left intact: everything is aged before her very eyes, in the studio, even before it is exhibited.

From this interplay emerge series with almost technical names — Trames, Armures, Grilles, Totems — which draw on the rigour of the vocabulary of architecture and weaving, whilst never forsaking the element of chance. The Armures, stretched with almost invisible metal wires, contrast the brutality of their knots with a silhouette reminiscent of samurai armour. The Grilles, on the other hand, lighten the gesture: here, metal becomes a loop, lead becomes a bead, and the void counts for just as much as the material.
"Compose, decompose, recompose": this formula, with which the artist herself describes her approach, sums up a body of work that refuses to limit textile expression to a single technique.

This approach to creating a work by deliberately ageing it places Altmayer within a history of weaving that predates her own: the history that Anni Albers, at the Bauhaus and later at Black Mountain College, had elevated from craftsmanship to a visual language in its own right, in which the thread is as significant as the line in a drawing. But Altmayer shifts this legacy into darker territory, one that owes less to the loom than to an entirely different material: lead. Like Anselm Kiefer, who loads his canvases with lead, ash and straw to imbue them with the weight of collective memory, Altmayer chooses heavy, tarnished materials so that her pieces appear already ancient, already excavated — relics that have just been unearthed rather than objects that have just been made. For both artists, ruin is not something endured: it is constructed, with as much care as that which it is supposed to have destroyed.

Having exhibited since 2005 (at the Château de Carrouges, the Chapelle des Ursulines in Ancenis, the Galerie du Rayon Vert in Nantes, and the ST’ART fair in Strasbourg), Altmayer is now represented by the Amélie du Chalard gallery in Paris and New York.