Marc Van Hoe – The Van Hoe Collection: Grammar of Textiles

“With this collection, I attempt to clarify that these are not only textile designs. There is a lot more to it than that: making links to developments in the fields of art, culture and politics is only logical and at least as important. My collection seeks above all to stimulate curiosity when reading (or learning to read) images.”

The Van Hoe Collection—with drawings, designs, point papers and textiles—covers the period between 1830 till the beginning of the 21th Century. The highlights in this collection consist out of the Art Nouveau and the Art Deco period, modernism as well as old Japanese textiles. The Van Hoe Collection shows an exciting view of the interconnection between art and design on textile innovation and the industry producing them during almost 200 years. The collection is built around designs made for Jacquard woven interior textiles.

If there has ever been a man to whom this motto applies, it’s Marc Van Hoe. The man, or more precisely the artist, behind this rich collection—formed from fragments, sketches, drawings, scale designs for fabrics and wallpaper—is far from being the anaesthetist of his collections. Sometimes simply held to the wall with magnets, the drawings, left free from frames or covering glass, have their skin in contact with the air and the light: living. When they are not filed away in their drawers, it is with enthusiasm that he picks them out; a term that means to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Because this collection is also a conversation, Marc Van Hoe, creator of designs and fabrics, has a non-stop dialogue with the drawings that he has saved from certain destruction. Sometimes, the collector becomes a creator, thus making the grain rise up, from the thistle or the Dalhia. Behind this collection, a garden dense with designs, hide the artists and artisans with whom Marc Van Hoe has a conversation. For him, plants are no longer stylised and drawn, but first literally scanned and then retouched by his hand. From tracing to scanning; from pixel to pigment. The stylisation is not important, providing that there is intoxication.

Collector Marc Van Hoe is a textile designer and artist living and working in Brussels, Belgium. In 2010 he received the Henry van de Velde Career Award.