Carpet
2003, 99 individual pieces, clay, unfired, 200 × 200 cm
A fragment, a premonition – it could go on endlessly, growing in all directions. Each small body a personality, a state caught and solidified in its rolling and turning, sounded out and explored. The gap between the bodies a current, a light, present for the perception of the other, the nearly alike. Undulating earth, each body alone, alone within the whole – Teppich (carpet) – every body matters.
Barbara Heé’s Teppich powerfully embodies the principle pursued in the exhibition Abundance: “difference without their separability” (Denise Ferreira da Silva). Materials, processes, times, people, concepts, and technologies each bring their differences along, entering into manifold, contingent, and unforeseeable relations.
Barbara Heé is a Swiss artist based in Zurich who works across drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography. Trained as a textile designer in St. Gallen (1974–76) and Zurich (1976–80), she later pursued painting and textiles. Since the 1980s, her work has been shaped by a spiritually intuitive and landscape-informed practice — she embraces an understanding of art as an unfolding of mystery, not the creation of form.
Heé’s creative process is body-anchored and deeply contemplative, spanning drawing, sculptural objects, painting, and more recently, photography. Central to her sculptural language are the “Wälzkörper” (rolling bodies) — objects grown from repetitive kneading of clay, sometimes cast in bronze and left with traces of their making as a celebration of their embodied origins.
In 1998, Heé presented Teppich – 101 Wälzkörper, a monumental floor installation in Winterthur’s Kunsthalle, consisting of 101 individual clay elements that evoke a fabric-like topology. Her work has been acquired by major institutions including Kunsthaus Zürich, Kanton Zürich, Musée des Beaux-Arts Lausanne, Kunst(Zeug)Haus Rapperswil, Albertina Vienna, as well as numerous private collections. Her work was shown at Shedhalle as part of the exhibition Künstler aus Zürich in 1985.
