Over the past year, ELLE DECOR has asked artisans to create unique items—with no price tag—for each issue’s Not for Sale column. Now, in partnership with Christie’s, each of these pieces will be auctioned off to benefit charity.
Artist: Madeline Weinrib
Title: The Mustalaa Project
Year created: 2019
Medium: Vintage Silk
Edition: Unique
Height (inches): 84
Width (inches): 60
Signed by the artist
Signed Area: back
The rich colors, bold prints, and warm textiles of Morocco have long served as a mecca of inspiration for designers. So it’s not surprising that the artist turned textile designer Madeline Weinrib—who last year closed her eponymous New York showroom after two decades—has been spending time in Marrakech, where she is now a partner in the renowned boutique hotel El Fenn. The geometric beauty of Moroccan fireplace mosaics—known as zellige, with intricate tile patterns based on Islamic art— inspired this new handmade rug. It is woven out of repurposed vintage silk by artisans in India, whose ability to create a luminous palette mesmerized the designer. The soft fusion of colors—and cultures—represents everything Weinrib adores. “A rug is a very interactive piece in your home,” she says. “So the process itself needs to be collaborative.”
Designer Madeline Weinrib has shaped a signature-sophisticated style that is at once timeless and contemporary. With her collections of iconic rugs and textiles, Madeline actively challenges the boundaries between art and design. An established painter, Madeline exhibited regularly throughout the 1990s before designing her first rug collection in 1997. Inspired by the challenge of translating painterly ideals to warp and weft, she sensed an opportunity to carve out a new niche and to modernize what was at the time a traditional idiom. Embracing authenticity as one of her hallmark values, Madeline’s aesthetic is defined by her individual approach to pattern, palette and scale and the use of techniques that favor hand over machine and tradition over automation. Madeline Weinrib has collaborated with such institutions as the The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Neue Galerie, the Cooper Hewitt Museum, IFPDA Print Fair and the Art Production Fund.