Wandbespanning 1911 - 1915

Chris Lebeau made this wall covering, Wandbespanning, at some point in his career, using dyed and block-printed linen. I am really interested in the tension between the implied repetition in the work and the feeling you get that this was made by hand. I imagine Lebeau thinking hard about the relationship between making a pattern and making art. He probably considered the labour intensive, manual labor of printing. He would have been interested in the history of the craft, and perhaps questioning the place of craft within art. You can see how the surface creates these strange and ambiguous forms, which, for me, exist between ornament and architecture, creating an off-kilter space in which one is never quite sure where one is. The history of painting is, for me, one of conversation, where artists talk to each other across time and space, riffing on ideas, throwing in their two cents, and then passing it on.