In the series PALE GEOMETRIES, Adelina Ivan explores the intersection of painting, decorative art and traditional textile craft. The works use geometric motifs, historically employed by women in techniques such as sewing, braiding, and weaving, as well as patterns from the textile industry. Through reduction and layering, Ivan translates these forms into a painterly visual vocabulary. Textile fragments are not simply integrated but participate in the pictorial process itself: fabric leaves its imprint on acrylic, image, and textile merge until distinctions between painting and material dissolve. Ivan ́s artistic approach deliberately interrogates and destabilizes the canonical hierarchy between so-called „high art” and the historically marginalized „decorative arts“. In her practice, textiles – ubiquitous objects in intimate proximity to bodies and domestic spaces – function as carriers of both personal and collective narratives. Their tactility and everyday presence permeate them with a communicative capacity that Ivan mobilizes to articulate lived experience and embodied memory.

Throughout much of the 20th century, textile work remained peripheral within Western art discourse, associated with femininity, domesticity, and the private sphere, and therefore excluded from the realm of autonomous art. Ivan, however, foregrounds the structural and conceptual complexity of textile techniques – less as sentimental gestures and more as logical, repetitive, and systemic operations. These processes resonate with algorithmic thinking and computational logic.

The late 1990s marked a critical shift in the perception of textiles as art, in part due to the rising cultural relevance of „networks“. In an increasingly interconnected world – technologically, socially, conceptually – woven structures came to be seen as paradigmatic forms: ordered, interrelated systems.

Ivan embraces this framework, treating textile structures as both visual and metaphorical representations of contemporary complexity. In her work, textile form is no longer a vehicle of representation but a tool of construction – a made of production that privileges interconnection, repetition, and transformation over depiction.