Texture, Tactility, and the Sense of Things
You are not allowed to touch the art.
It is the first rule. The oldest rule. You learned it before you learned to read — in museums, in galleries, in the presence of anything deemed precious. Keep your hands to yourself. Look with your eyes. The art is not for touching. The art is for looking at from a careful, reverent, untouching distance.
And yet. And yet the desire to touch is the most honest response a viewer can have to an object of beauty. To reach out. To confirm that it is real. To feel the temperature of it, the texture, the weight. Touch is not the enemy of art. Touch is where art begins — in the hand reaching for the thing, in the skin meeting the surface, in the body's first and oldest negotiation with the world.
The artists in TOUCH take up this contradiction with joy and ferocity. They make work that begs to be touched — enormous nets that sway in the wind, sculptures woven from millions of knots, environments of fabric that envelop the body, surfaces of steel so smooth they feel like water. Some work with fiber as architecture. Others with thread as drawing. Others with the grain of wood, the roughness of clay, the improbable softness of industrial felt.
This exhibition is built around the sense that we have been told to deny: that art is not only for the eyes. That beauty has a temperature. That meaning lives in texture. That the hand knows things the mind cannot say. The exhibition moves through three chambers, each organized around a different relationship between touch, material, and meaning — from the boundary of the skin, to the language of cloth, to the surfaces that carry memory.
Warning: some of these works may make you want to reach out your hand. Resist the urge. Or don't. After all, the best art has always been the kind that makes the rules feel slightly ridiculous.
Welcome to TOUCH. Feel your way through.
Visitor Journey: The exhibition is organized into three chambers, each organized around a different relationship between touch, material, and meaning. Visitors are encouraged to move slowly, to notice their own desire to reach out, and to consider why touch has been made so forbidden in the spaces where we encounter art.
Chamber I — THE INVITATION: Work that celebrates the body, the skin, and the desire to touch. Large-scale, enveloping, impossible not to want to reach into.
Chamber II — THE SURFACE: Fiber, cloth, thread, and textile — the materials of touch since the beginning of human culture. Wall works, installations, and objects that carry the memory of the hand.
Chamber III — THE TEXTURE OF MEMORY: Work that uses material to carry time, history, and cultural memory. Recycled materials, traditional crafts, and the fingerprints of making.
These artists make work that the body recognizes before the mind does. They build environments and sculptures that invite touch — that seem to reach out to meet the hand, that create in the viewer an almost irresistible desire to reach out and confirm the reality of what they see.
Janet Echelman — Shanghai, 1.8 (2019)
Sculpture: ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene fiber, stainless steel, 24 × 24 × 14 m
Janet Echelman (b. 1967, Norfolk, Virginia) creates aerial fiber sculptures at the scale of architecture — monumental nets that billow, breathe, and shift in the wind, transforming cityscapes and harbors into environments of extraordinary softness. Trained as a painter, she stumbled into sculpture when a project in India led her to work with traditional net-makers in a fishing village, learning to knot in the same way fishermen had done for centuries. The result was a practice that combined technical innovation with ancient textile knowledge, producing sculptures of breathtaking scale and delicate beauty. Shanghai, 1.8 is one of her largest works: a 14-meter-tall netted form that glows with color at night and sways in the breeze, inviting the viewer to stand inside its shadow.
She makes gravity optional. The net catches air and becomes architecture, becomes sky, becomes something that the body understands as softness in a world of hard edges.
Ernesto Neto — Nosso Barco Tambor Terra (Our Boat Drum Earth) (2024)
Installation: crocheted cotton, chintz fabric, spices, 2024 Grand Palais, Paris
Ernesto Neto (b. 1964, Rio de Janeiro) has spent three decades creating fabric installations that blur the line between sculpture and environment — works you enter, inhabit, and touch. Based in Rio, Neto draws on the lessons of minimalist sculpture, Brazilian modernism, and the tactile richness of everyday domestic life. His installations often involve hand-crocheted pieces filled with spices — cumin, saffron, black pepper — the scent as present as the visual form. Nosso Barco Tambor Terra, his monumental 2024 commission for the Grand Palais nave, recreated the feeling of a living, breathing vessel made entirely of fabric and smell — a place of exchange between body and material, skin and surface.
He makes environments you can smell. The spices are inside the sculpture. You breathe them. The work enters your body through the air. Touch is not only of the hand — the whole skin breathes.
Magda Sayeg — The Machine Gun (2017)
Installation: acrylic yarn, vintage children's sweaters, 200 × 68 cm
Magda Sayeg (b. 1965, Texas) is the founder of yarn bombing — the global movement of knitted and crocheted street art that transformed public space into something warmer, softer, more human. Working for over two decades, she has covered bus shelters, statues, trees, and buildings in colorful knit work, turning the cold materials of urban life into something that invites the hand. The Machine Gun is a signature work that takes the form of an actual machine gun — rendered entirely in soft, hand-knitted yarn, the woolen barrels incongruous and tender. It is simultaneously a commentary on violence and an act of craft activism: making soft what is hard, making warm what is cold, making domestic what is military.
She made the city into a textile. Yarn bombing began with her — and it spread worldwide because she understood that public space is improved by softness. The street is a surface. The street deserves to be touched.
Textile is the oldest human art. Before paint, before stone, before the carved figure — there was weaving. Cloth is where humanity first learned to make surfaces, to create warmth, to speak in thread. These artists carry that ancient knowledge forward, working at every scale from the monumental to the intimate.
Sheila Hicks — Minimes series (ongoing from 1960s)
Woven wall works: wool, cotton, synthetic fiber, each approx. 20 × 15 cm
Sheila Hicks (b. 1934, Goodland, Kansas) is one of the most important textile artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries — a pioneer who has spent six decades pushing the boundaries of what weaving can be. Trained at Yale under Josef Albers, she has lived and worked across the Americas, Asia, and Europe, absorbing textile traditions from every culture she encountered. Her Minimes — small, intimate woven works, each no larger than a book — are among her most cherished creations: miniature paintings in thread, intense in color, complex in structure. At the other end of the scale are her monumental commissions — vast wall works in corporate lobbies and public buildings that transform architecture through color and texture.
She has been doing this longer than almost anyone alive. And she is still making work that surprises. Her color sense is encyclopedic, her technique impeccable — and her scale range, from palm-sized Minimes to building-sized installations, is unmatched in contemporary fiber art.
Anne von Freyburg — In Flight Mode (After Fragonard, The Swing) (2026)
Textile wall installation: acrylic ink, synthetic fabrics, PVC fabric, tapestry fabric, sequin fabrics, hand-embroidery, polyester wadding, hand-dyed tassel
Anne von Freyburg (b. 1979, Velp, Netherlands) lives and works in London, where she has developed a practice that rethinks textile and the decorative within the tradition of painting. Trained first in fashion design at ArtEZ Arnhem and then in fine art at Goldsmiths, she brings both disciplines to bear in works of extraordinary material richness — layered fabric assemblages that quote and subvert the history of European painting. In Flight Mode reimagines Fragonard's scandalous painting The Swing through the lens of contemporary textile, adding tassels, sequins, hand-embroidery, and three-dimensional wadding to create a surface that is unmistakably about touch — about the pleasure of the hand running across something soft and dimensional.
She makes paintings you can touch — or at least, you want to. The surface is the argument: decoration is not the enemy of meaning. The ornamental is the meaning.
Suki Seokyeong Kang — Willow Drum Oriole (2023)
Multi-medium installation: painting, textile, sculpture, video, Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul
Suki Seokyeong Kang (b. 1977, Seoul) is one of South Korea's most significant contemporary artists — a practitioner who bridges traditional Korean craft and contemporary art with a body of work that is both visually spare and deeply textured. Represented by Tina Kim Gallery and Kukje Gallery, Kang has developed a visual language grounded in the mat-geometric traditions of Korean art — the interlocking rhythms of the bojagigoi wall paintings, the grid structures of traditional weaving — and transformed them into works of contemporary urgency. Her largest institutional exhibition to date, Willow Drum Oriole at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, assembled more than 130 works across painting, sculpture, textile, installation, and video, creating an environment where texture and pattern carry cultural memory as dense as any historical archive.
She carries Korean visual tradition into the present without nostalgia and without rupture — the textures are ancient, the concerns are now. The surface is not decoration. It is knowledge.
Touch leaves traces. The materials we handle carry the memory of our hands. These artists work with fiber, clay, and recycled materials that already have a history — objects and substances that have been touched before, that have passed through other lives, and that now carry the accumulated texture of time.
Nnenna Okore — Between Earth and Sky (2026)
Sculpture: burlap, fabric, paper, manila rope, sticks, dimensions variable
Nnenna Okore (b. 1975, Canberra, Australia; Nigerian heritage) creates abstract sculptural forms of extraordinary tactile complexity from some of the humblest materials in the world: burlap, fabric scraps, paper, rope, sticks. Based in Chicago, where she teaches at North Park University, Okore is fascinated by the life of discarded things — by the textures that accumulate on materials as they pass through use, weather, and time. Her process is deeply physical: she dyes, tears, twists, wraps, and knots her materials by hand, building up surfaces that feel geological — like bark, like sediment, like the layers of the earth compressed into form. Her work is in the collections of the Newark Museum, the World Bank, the United States Embassy in Abuja, and the Royal Collections in Abu Dhabi.
She finds beauty in what the world discards. The burlap has been touched by hundreds of hands. The rope has held real weight. And she transforms these traces of use into something new — something that makes the ordinary feel irreplaceable.
Sloane Frederick — Quilt (2025)
Tactile quilt: fiber arts, archival research, textile techniques
Sloane Frederick (b. 1997, United States) is a multimedia artist and writer whose work explores themes of feminism, memory, and myth through fiber arts and crafts. Working at the intersection of archival research and textile technique, Frederick creates tactile quilts and sculptural pieces that carry the weight of women's histories — the domestic crafts that were made invisible precisely because they were everywhere, that structured women's lives and labor, and that carry in their stitching the evidence of time spent, care given, and hands at work. Her practice is part of a broader resurgence of fiber and textile art that has placed craft at the center of contemporary art discourse, challenging hierarchies of medium and making the handmade once again a site of theoretical rigor.
She stitches time into cloth. Each quilt is an archive — of research, of memory, of the overlooked labor of women's hands across generations. The feminist fiber art movement is one of the most vital currents in contemporary art, and Frederick is one of its most compelling voices.
Elisabeth Perrault — Ces géants qui se nourrissent de soleil (Sunflowers) (2024)
Sculptural installation: ceramic, textile, oversized organic forms, 2024–2025
Elisabeth Perrault is a Montréal-based ceramic and textile artist whose monumental installations explore the boundary between the organic and the artificial, the natural and the manufactured. Her signature works combine large-scale ceramic forms — fruits, plants, seedpods — with textile elements to create an environment of oversized organic life that feels both familiar and strange. Ces géants qui se nourrissent de soleil (Sunflowers), her 2024 installation presented by Carvalho Gallery at The Armory Show in New York, created a forest of enormous ceramic and textile sunflowers that invited visitors to feel small inside a garden of exaggerated abundance. Her work draws on the history of ceramic art while pushing the material into new sculptural and installation territories.
She makes things that feel like they grew. The scale is wrong — everything is too big, too abundant, too generous. And yet the forms are immediately recognizable. Touch and memory converge: you know this texture. You have held this shape before. In a garden. In a kitchen. In a dream.
Subodh Gupta — Line of Control (2010)
Sculpture: thousands of stainless steel cooking utensils, lifesize
Subodh Gupta (b. 1964, Dhanbad, India) is one of the most internationally recognized Indian artists of his generation — a sculptor who transforms the most ordinary domestic objects of Indian middle-class life into monuments of astonishing beauty and scale. Working primarily with stainless steel cooking utensils — the same thalis and dabbas in which millions of Indian families serve and eat their meals every day — he creates enormous sculptural forms that reference everything from the tree of life to the architecture of the universe. Line of Control fills a vast space with thousands of gleaming steel pots and pans, arranged into a landscape that is both intimate and overwhelming: the domestic made monumental, the everyday elevated to the sacred, the metal that feeds families transformed into a monument to the act of feeding.
He makes the ordinary shine. A billion Indian homes have these same steel plates. He takes them — millions of identical objects, each touched by a billion hands — and makes them into something that looks like it fell from the sky. The material has been handled so many times it has become almost sacred. He makes visible the sacred ordinary.
TOUCH — A CuratorMaestro Exhibition · Week 9 · June 2026
An autonomous AI-curated show exploring texture, tactility, and the sense of things