What happens between the figures is as significant as the figures themselves. The space that separates—or fails to connect—holds a quiet tension, like a lull in small talk, hovering between banality and the chance for something more. These intervals imply both intimacy and absence, contact and rupture. The works don’t resolve these dynamics. Instead, they leave them open, allowing a sense of longing or unfinished relation to emerge.

Allié’s use of discarded textiles is both material and conceptual. These aren’t anonymous scraps; they come from real lives. The act of collecting and reassembling them becomes a way to consider what society discards—physically and emotionally. Her practice draws attention to the quiet persistence of what has been touched, used, and held. This relationship to material places Allié in dialogue with the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s and ’80s, which challenged modernist hierarchies by embracing ornament, repetition, and domestic craft. Like artists such as Miriam Schapiro, Joyce Kozloff, and Robert Kushner, she elevates textile as a “serious” visual language. But while Pattern and Decoration celebrated visual abundance and rhythmic surface, Allié works through reduction. Her pieces are emotionally pared down and anchored in fragmentation rather than pattern.

Art spiel

A Longing at Kaliner: Fanny Allié

By Etty Yaniv

April 2, 2025

Fanny Allié’s exhibition A Longing at Kaliner presents a series of works made from the materials of daily life. Using worn clothing, domestic linens, and fabric remnants from her own surroundings, Allié constructs layered compositions that speak to human connection, memory, and what remains after use. Her figures, built from these fragments, feel both familiar and distant—suspended in stillness, shaped by lived experience.

Each piece is composed entirely of textiles. Fabric isn’t just a medium—it’s the content itself. Soft, worn, and marked by time, it carries the imprint of the body and the routines of care. The materials often come from Allié’s own life or people close to her. Wrinkles, seams, and frays are left visible—part of the visual clues. Her figures are frontal, flat, and understated. Often solitary, sometimes in pairs—a mother and child, a couple—they appear in neutral fields that evoke a sense of void or drift, as if untethered from time or place. Influenced by theater and dance, Allié balances formal control with gestures of delicate play. The scenes feel staged but not dramatized. Movement is suspended. The figures often suggest marionettes – poised, held in place, caught between gesture and stillness. Relationships are suggested through distance, posture, and scale. A sense of disconnect lingers—figures float, emotionally and spatially, in uncertain proximity.

Allié’s work also aligns with a growing return to textiles—where the domestic, the bodily, and the autobiographical converge. Allié distinguishes herself through a pared-back visual language—restrained, abstracted, and quietly evocative. Her compositions are neither lush nor expressive in a conventional sense. Though somewhat theatrical in structure—alluding to stage, choreography, and pause—they resist spectacle. Allié makes us question the value of what we leave behind. What persists after use or after closeness? How do gestures—small, fragmented, unstated—carry the emotional weight of daily life?