Tapestry

Târgu Mureş-born graphic artist Klára Tamás (1946–2021) specialized in posters and books. She also put the lessons of her graphic works into use in tapestry designs. She made her first tapestries in Romania, before moving to New York in 1992.

With conflicts caused by armed violence as its subject, the tapestry Davids and Goliaths was designed by Klára Tamás in 2009. The wars waged in Iraq and Afghanistan at the time provided the work with a personal relevance: the artist was fearful of her stepson becoming deployed as a soldier in the Middle East. The rock at the centre of this tense and chaotic composition, from which menacing, demonic figures burst out, can be interpreted as an allegory of the conflict that divides the human figures and faces on either side. The title of the work refers to the well-known biblical characters in the plural, thus identifying all the participants in the war with the two fighting parties, but the characters in the scene are not clearly distinguishable, so the artist deliberately blurs the distinction between the strong and the weak, the aggressor and the victim. This large piece was woven in China, with the use of the wide palette of colours specified by the artist, on the model of Aubusson tapestries.