How does architecture shape our perception of place?
The work explores urban structures that are captured and reinterpreted through textile printing techniques. The work consists of a series of textiles that vary according to location and materiality. Through monoprint and screen printing, buildings are illustrated and abstracted into new visual forms.
The title Palazzo derives from the Italian word for “building.” Interestingly, the artist, Krumme Lanke, instinctively associates Palazzo with a grand palace, while an ordinary residential building would never be called that—or would it? This very irony became his inspiration: to take architecture and translate it into a new visual language.
Patterns shape not only the design of the textiles but also the character of cities. They repeat, define spaces, and give locations their unique identity. Like urban structures, they constantly change, grow, or are destroyed.
Naples
Monotype
The new city. Facades with statues or giant doors framed by stone arches. Balconies wrapped in plastic tarps. Palaces in ruin and peeled, colorful walls with windows of many sizes. Each monumental building, like a collage, fills the surface. Inside the neighborhood and its narrow streets, attached to the volcanic ground, improvised altars grow. Built and wedged between door and window, or garage and neighbor, with tiles or flowerpots, they never fail to entertain every fifty steps.
Goián
Monotype
On the Spanish side of the Minho River, facades protect themselves from the rain. Buildings massive in appearance, yet able to be caressed. Slowly, the marbled texture dries.
Alto Minho
Two-color screen printing
In the northern Portuguese region, white houses with orange roofs shelter behind walls. Outside lie cornfields; inside, pairs of hydrangeas. The squares vary yet resemble one another, and it is the Minho River that vividly waters the villages.
Ruin City
Monotype with stencil
A place very present yet never visited. Once full of life, streets and squares, today its bricks weep among ruins and embers. Wind moves through the rubble, facades sink into shadow. No one at the windows. There is no longer bustle, no sound of footsteps, only the distant echo of a ruined home.
Bari
Monotype with stencil and screen print
The old town, like a pattern, invites one to get lost. This watercolor-like technique approaches the Mediterranean feeling. Alleyways shifting through a spectrum of sandy tones and prints dried like drops of salt. A fundamental element included in the design is the miraculous column. This column appeared inexplicably, without anyone physically bringing it, in the crypt of the Basilica of Saint Nicholas. It rests against the next block of buildings, offering a new distribution of color.
Palazzo
Monotype
Building inspired by an existing one located in Lecce, Italy. “An architect is the drafter of dreams,” according to Grace McGarvie, or a drafter is the architect of their dreams.
Ghent
Monotype
Red brick makes an exception to mold a building with rounded forms. Beyond stepped facades, it is the glowing signs that awaken hunger. Lunch picked up from the shop, devoured as a group in the dining room at home. It is Belgian fast food that not every stomach celebrates.
The Technique
Textile screen printing is a printing process that uses a stretched mesh as a stencil. Ink is pushed through the mesh onto the fabric with a squeegee, leaving the design imprinted. This process can be repeated with different colors and layers to create the final image. In the case of monotype, it is a unique printing process in which ink or paint is applied directly onto the stretched mesh and then transferred to the fabric using a printing paste. Each print is one of a kind, as the same design can never be repeated exactly.
Goián
Monotype
It is the cinema that stands abandoned. Few remain whose historic facades have not been replaced. Which cinema invites one to enter?
Space as a place of connection.
The first presentation of the work took place in February 2025 in Halle (Saale). The exhibition space was an apartment that was undergoing renovation. This place preserves both the past and the transition toward its future form. The same occurs with the textile works, which evoke nostalgia but can be reinterpreted through their presence in the space.Regarding the choice of the places represented in the textiles, it is based on those in which the artist has lived, resided temporarily, or visited, and which inspired him in the search for his identity.
Curated by José Madrigal Despaigne. Photography by Emilio Alvarez Trinchet and Monika Horstmann. 3D Scan by Lion Sanguinette.