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A stunning Kaitag embroidery,…
Sale Title:
Auction House:
Auction Location:
Melbourne
Date:
19-Sep-2023
Lot No.
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Description:
A stunning Kaitag embroidery, Daghestan, Caucasus, eighteenth century, silk on cotton, mounted on a stretch frame. Kaitag embroideries were made in the mountainous and sometimes inaccessible villages of Daghestan in the Caucasian Mountain region where the modern-day borders of Russia, Turkey and Iran now provide artificial barriers between a wide range of ethnic and language groups. The Kaitag people were active producers of these traditionally designed and dramatically coloured textiles during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When Daghestan became part of the Soviet Union in the early twentieth century, their language and cultural traditions gradually died out. Up to that time, the embroideries had both domestic and ritual uses connected with birth, marriage and death and were handed down within families become increasingly sought after by collectors in the last twenty years or so, and their abstract designs have been compared to twentieth-century masters such as Klee, Miro and Matisse. This example has a design of very stylised tree forms above and below a whirling sun sign, an archaic motif that dates to the time when paganism and Zoroastrianism prevailed in the Caucasus, before the arrival of the monotheistic religions. The indigo-dyed cotton ground cloth adds impact to the effect of the four main colours of the laid-and-couched embroidery. Provenance: Exhibited Adam Galleries, Melbourne, 1995; thereafter in the collection of Elizabeth Cross and the late Dr Jack Wodak. Published: Exhibition brochure, Kaitag: an exhibition of eighteenth and nineteenth century embroideries from the Caucasian Mountain region, Melbourne, 1995, plate 3. Dimensions: 97 cm x 55 cm
Estimate:
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Price:
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Category:
Unclassified