Lortet, Marie-Rose

Marie-Rose Lortet; photo: Pierre Bérenger.

Education: knitting, according to family tradition.

Profession/occupation: textile artist

Art form/medium: knitting and fabric sculptures of wool and solidified thread lace.

Start artwork: began knitting at early age.

Relevant info: 1969 encouraged by Dubuffet; inclusion in Art Brut Collection, as Neuve Invention.

(Solo-) exhibitions: Les Singuliers de l’art, Paris, 1978; Woollen territories, architectures of thread 1967-2000, retrospective at the Jean Lurçat Museum of Contemporary Textiles, Angers, France, 2000-2001.

References: Linda Goddard; Architectures in Thread, in: Raw Vision # 40, 2002, pp. 48-54;
Outsider Art Sourcebook, (Raw Vision) 2016, p.147.
Catalogue INSITA 2010
, p.156.

Born in Strasbourg in 1945, Marie-Rose Lortet began making collages of assembled artefacts from an early age. Having observed her mother and grandmother knitting clothes, she found the procedure came naturally, but she disregarded its practical uses in favour of creating ‘flexible images that could follow me wherever I went’. At the age of sixteen, she was briefly employed in a couture house, but found herself unable to conform to the designer’s patterns, and instinctively began to make tiny clothes, their sleeves ‘more suited to the wings of angels than the arms of models’. She progressed to small pictures made of fabric before devoting her attention to colourful tightly-knitted figure compositions. They were generally scorned or ignored until, in 1967, she read a newspaper article investigating ‘unconventional’ creative activity. She recalls, ‘A friend sent some of my small-scale works to Jean Dubuffet’s Compagnie de L’Art Brut, rue de Sèvres, Paris.’ From: Raw Vision.

Marie-Rose Lortet
1945 Strasbourg, France -