9th European Quilt Triennial

23.05.2025 – 14.09.2025

In this show, 45 contemporary quilt and textile artworks from 11 nations demonstrate that creativity, artistic inspiration and time-critical statements are not the sole preserve of painting, sculpture, graphics and photographic art. The high-calibre exhibits were selected by a five-member international jury from over 130 entries.
The development of the ‘quilt’ art form from a predominantly functional blanket to an autonomous work of art over the last 50 years is impressive. For example, the exhibition includes a floor object entitled ‘Polar bear, I don’t want to be a polar bear, in the warm polar’, which is both three-dimensional and political.

The proportion of young female applicants was pleasingly high, with 7 of these artists making it into the exhibition. The prize for talented young quilters went to Slovakia for a three-dimensional work dealing with intergenerational cohesion.

The Swiss artist Judith Mundwiler, winner of the Doris Winter Memorial Prize in 2018, received the prize for innovation in a large format for her work ‘Fragments of Everyday Life’, a contemporary document made up of thought-provoking pieces of paper thrown onto Post It notes.

The Doris Winter Memorial Prize 2024 was once again shared this year between two equally worthy objects, both of which deal with the effects of brain diseases or overload: ‘Dementia – Sinking into Oblivion’ by Christa Ebert (Germany) and ‘Kopflast’ by Monika Sebert (Germany) both touch the viewer emotionally in different ways.

The 9th European Quilt Triennial will open at the Max Berk Textile Collection on 9 February 2025 and will be on display there until 4 May 2025. The St. Gallen Textile Museum will be showing the exhibition from 23 May 2025 up to and including 14 September 2025. Further stops of the travelling exhibition are planned.