A presentation of recent works by Norbert Fiddelers at Kunstrai, 22–26 April 2026.

Norbert Fiddelers: Left-overs…Right?
What remains after the cut? After the seam, the season, the discarded bolt of cloth? For over three decades, Dutch artist Norbert Fiddelers has worked with what industry leaves behind, gathering, rewinding, and reassembling the textile world’s excess into an ever-growing archive of intimate works.

Fiddelers collects the overlooked: leftover fabrics, industrial yarns, horse wool, chalk stone, fragments of print and pattern rescued from mass consumption. These materials are laid together, layered, and bound; wrapped into dense cocoon-like objects; or stretched across surfaces in hand-drawn grids of yarn that hold collaged fabric pieces and horsehair in a kind of tender suspension. Paint, illustration, and sculpture enter where needed, adding the mark of a daily practice that resembles a soft sketchbook and a material record that is modest in scale and cumulative in effect.

The grid recurs throughout Fiddelers’ work as a net of belonging rather than a structure to control. Fragments that can no longer fulfill their original function find new relations here: the scrap becomes a syllable, and the collage becomes a story told in texture, tension, and touch.

Running through the practice is a persistent question about value and remainder: what a material carries after its usefulness has ended, and what new relations become possible when fragments are brought together into a new cohesive whole. These are works that ask us to slow down, to look again at what was on its way to being thrown away, and to find in the leftover something irreplaceable.

Presented in collaboration with peergallery Maastricht.
Norbert Fiddelers (b. Netherlands) has worked in textile and fashion research since the early 1990s to produce works that exist at the border of painting, textile art, and sculptural object. His wearable project B.o.r.n, launched in 2000 and still presenting regularly in Japan, extends this sensibility into the body itself as an archive made to be worn. His work is held in public and private collections worldwide.