Matti Braun Untitled, 2026

Matti Braun’s Untitled is a batik on silk work, presented on a powder coated aluminum frame. The work continues Braun’s sustained engagement with traditional textile techniques and the cultural knowledge embedded in them. Executed on the same silk used for his well-known silk paintings, the piece produces a markedly different surface through the batik process.

The dye process has its roots in the artist's investigation and appropriation of traditional techniques of textile production often used for religious or ritualistic purposes but unlike his earlier patola or batik series they no longer show the iconographic traces of their sources. There is a palpable tension between the new work's restraint and its hypnotic lushness created by the combination of apparently simple means and the complexity of their creation. Both the extensive references to the artist's project of investigating historical and cultural phenomena and the more immediate curiosity of how the seamless color modulations are created. In Braun’s practice, the demanding craft process becomes both a material investigation and a reflection on the transmission and transformation of historical techniques.