Type: Furniture
Technique: Mixed embroidery
Year: 2018 - ongoing
Edition: Limited
Size: Large
Dimension: 212 x 170 cm | 83.5 x 66.9 in
Number of stitches: over 700,000
Thread length: over 9 km | over 5.6 mi
Thread colours: 19
Development: over 600 person hours
Price: on request
About the artwork
Embroidery can be the heart of art and of interior design. When the two are combined, a unique project is born. “My Heart is Green, Green” embroidered folding screen is a masterful display of both design and art, working in harmony with a completely unique approach to embroidery itself: two-sided embroidered art with an array of embroidery techniques and colours works perfectly from all sides.
Sicoe used his favourite wall decorative pattern of tulips as a starting point, reusing the nostalgic design in his own fashion, in a motif dedicated to his heart of green, the traditional colour of Ljubljana sport teams. In a way, the folding screen is his cheering display, both for the sports and for the colour of clean, simple art language, following the traditions of Matisse. Sicoe intentionally untangled his art into clean lines and simple forms specifically for the embroidery, only to have them tangled with threads during the embroidery process. Through the three panels of the folding screen, he expressed his emotions and painting philosophy, additionally supported with the seemingly simple and naturalistic wooden frame. Minimalism and at the same time richness of meaning, spoken with the language of a modern painting travel through the history of painting. Bon voyage, my green heart.
About the artist
»Colour often shows the way; in the painting of Silvester Plotajs – Sicoe, it is a building block of unbounded expressiveness. Intense and varied, employed along the principle of more is more and never too much, it challenges a viewer to explore boundaries between expressiveness of colour and responsiveness of light in every work. The eruption of colours and the intensity of light combine in a rhythm of images that the artist carefully and deliberately arranges in space, despite their apparent ease, humour, playfulness, and even jocularity.« (Sarival Sosić)
Silvester Plotajs – Sicoe was born in 1965 in Ljubljana. He has graduated at the Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts, where he earned master’s degrees in painting and graphic art. He also took advanced courses at the Minerva Academy in Groningen in The Netherlands. He works as a free-lance artist in Ljubljana.
Features
Extraordinary number of stitches
In a classic embroidery, the number of stitches is somewhere between 20,000 and 200,000, and is limited by stretching and contracting of materials. By overcoming this limitations, we are able to make embroideries with millions of stitches which enables us to produce photorealistic embroideries and recreate any painting of any artistic style.
Innovation of layering
We layer multiple colours of threads and so create rich embroidery and colour texture that is impossible to create with classic one-layer embroidery technique. By layering, we develop colour transitions and shadowing, by which we create multiple-colour surfaces, similar to pointillism painting.
Sophisticated colour calibration
Usually in embroidery, 10 or 20, maybe 30 colours of threads are used. We use around 1,000 colour hues and if a colour still doesn’t match the desired one, we create it by layering and colour transitions. We have digitally scanned colours of all threads by using a spectrograph, so we can colour match any colour from an original material or from CMYK, RGB or Pantone colour schemes.