Vera Vermeersch, tapestry weaver and artist, trained as an art historian and as tapestry restorer at IRPA (Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage), was one of the founders of the Oudenaardse Huis Lalaing, which restored old tapestries in the mid-1980s. In 1989 she opened her own studio in Ghent, Belgium, specializing in contemporary tufted tapestries for floors and walls. Vermeersch creates her own designs, but also collaborated with some other local and international artists. For example, she has transposed works by Maarten van Severen, Tjok Dessauvage, Roger Raveel, Fred Bervoets, Johan Tahon, Volker Albus, Pjeroo Roobjee and Sofie Lachaert into tufted tapestries. She also collaborated with members of her artistic family, including her sculptor father José Vermeersch, her brother Rik Vermeersch and her cousin, painter Pieter Vermeersch.
At present, she exclusively conceives and makes her own creations inspired by her travels, Italian landscapes, and details from antique tapestries and old masters. This artistic approach always implies a critical, meticulous and layered reading, interpreting and re- interpreting of the given subject to sublimate it in a composition of which she holds the secrets, the color palette, the interweaving of threads and the genius of the material. She is a master at translating the virtuosity and poetry of the original design into tapestries. Her new lyrical and intimist tapestries around Tree of Life inaugurate a new body of hand-tufted works, inspired by the day and night shadows and lights that she observes and that appear in the landscape of the Piedmont Valley that surrounds her countryside house, La Palude. The gallery presented in 2022 the Duo Exhibition «Tree of Life» with the Portuguese textile artist Bela Silva. Vera Vermeersch is represented by Spazio Nobile since 2021.
Bela Silva & Vera Vermeersch: Tree of Life
Vera Vermeersch: Unravel and Recompose
