Life as Cloth – Liv som tyg

Lenke Rothman (1929–2008) was a Hungarian-born Jewish artist and author based and working in Stockholm. As a sixteen-year-old, in 1945, she arrived alone in Malmö, Sweden after surviving two Nazi concentration camps – Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Upon her arrival, Rothman was in a severely weakened state and spent her first years in Sweden in convalescent homes, sanatoriums, and hospitals – a time that also marked the beginning of her artistic practice. Lenke Rothman experimented early on with different kinds of material and explored their inherent narrative potential. By insisting on the ability of materials to speak, express, and remember, she created multifaceted and deeply personal works throughout her sixty-year-long artistic career. She frequently used unconventional artistic materials and everyday objects. Buttons, safety pins, tickets, items of clothing, plastic bags— traces of life—were patched together in complex ways. She collected material in a way that is recognisable after experiences of war and trauma, of the Holocaust, where losing everything results in a later need to ensure that nothing more can be taken away. Thread, fabric, and stitches are central elements in Rothman’s visual world. Her interest in stitching was connected to a personal healing process, to the body’s scar tissue and the visible traces of lived experiences that cannot be hidden. At the same time, a larger act of mending took place, where she, stitch by stitch, attempted to repair existence by merging the past with the present. Or, as she herself wrote: “Stitch together what has been with what is, and pull the thread into what is yet to be.” Life as Cloth focuses on Lenke Rothman’s unique, conceptual approach to her working materials. The publication presents selected parts of Rothman’s extensive production, including paintings, drawings, installations, books, sculptures, objects and textiles. Most of the works come from the 1960s and 1970s, which was an exceptionally productive working period. The exhibition and the catalog is named after the installation Life as Cloth that Rothman created in 1981 for P.S.1, New York, which was found and restaged for the exhibition in Malmö in 2024.