This is the catalogue for the ongoing exhibition of antique and contemporary tapestries and carpets produced and organised by the Giorgio Cini Foundation with Factum Arte, Madrid, due to run on the Island of San Giorgio until 18 September 2011. The main idea
of the exhibition is to focus on Vittorio Cini’s great interest in tapestries and at the same time explore developments in contemporary art and the renewed ability of artists to use the medium to tell very varied, compelling stories from present-day life. The works in the catalogue range from late 15th-century tapestry depicting the destruction of Jerusalem to Azra Akšamija’s textiles on ethnic cleansing in Bosnia Herzegovina, Grayson Perry’s vast allegory of contemporary life in the Walthamstow Tapestry and Mark Quinn’s “flowers” of our manipulated natural world. Consequently, this is an exhibition that puts the woven image back at the heart of contemporary artistic practice. The itinerary has been suggestively illustrated in the catalogue edited by the exhibition curators Adam Lowe and Jerry Brotton; in addition to Pasquale Gagliardi’s introduction, there are texts by Jerry Brotton, Nello Forti
Grazzini, Annemarie Sauzeau Boetti, Jon Thompson, Adam Lowe and Iván De La Nuez.