Matti Braun Untitled, 2026

Matti Braun’s Untitled is a batik on silk piece presented on a powder-coated aluminum frame. It continues Braun’s sustained engagement with traditional textile techniques and the cultural knowledge embedded in them. Created on the same silk used for his renowned silk paintings, the piece achieves a strikingly different surface through the batik process.

This technique has its roots in the artist's investigation and appropriation of traditional textile production methods, which are often used for religious or ritualistic purposes. Unlike his earlier Patola or Batik series, however, these pieces no longer show the iconographic traces of their sources. There is a palpable tension between the piece's restraint and its hypnotic lushness, which is created by combining seemingly simple means with a complex creation process. There are both extensive references to the artist's project of investigating historical and cultural phenomena and a more immediate curiosity about how the seamless color modulations are created. In Braun’s practice, the demanding craft process becomes a material investigation and reflection on the transmission and transformation of historical techniques.