‘Grace Weaver in Morocco’ published on occasion of the exhibition ‘Grace Weaver: Hotel Paintings’, 13 Jan – 17 Feb 2024, Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris.

Grace Weaver spends July to September 2022 in Morocco. She is not only curious to retrace what Matisse, Bacon und Beckett experienced but also to explore the foreign impacts on her artistic work.

A brilliant series of 105 collages comes into being, created during all stages of the trip and drawn only with scissors. The collages present women, each seen in her own way and equally interwoven with her ornamental surroundings.

Glued into one, traditional Moroccan patterns and ornaments blend with Western brand names and logos, Arabic writing clashes with colonial French and English. This decorative trait defines the spaces, in which Weaver’s women reside. The scissors, in turn, transform everything into an ornament.

The lavishly designed book presents the collages as elaborate facsimiles and, completed by Eric Degenhardt’s travel photographs, allows us to immerse ourselves, as Grace Weaver’s women do, in unending ornamental intricacies.