TextielMuseum lets visitors wander through the world behind Hella Jongerius’ iconic textile designs.
Since 31 October, the exhibition Hella Jongerius – Smart hands has been on view at TextielMuseum in Tilburg. An enormous cross-shaped cabinet forms the central spatial gesture of the exhibition and cuts through the exhibition space. With its bold colours, large volumes and passageways, the design divides the space into different thematic worlds and draws visitors directly into Jongerius’ design practice. Among dozens of partially opened archive boxes, material experiments and realised works, visitors discover how she thinks, experiments and ultimately arrives at a design. In this way, Smart hands reveals what normally remains hidden behind the work of one of the Netherlands’ most influential designers.
The exhibition is centred around Hella Jongerius’ generous donation of her textile design archive to TextielMuseum. The textile archive comprises more than 4,000 sketches, models and material samples, collected over the course of her career spanning more than thirty years. In Smart hands, a selection from this extensive archive is shown in relation to the remarkable objects that emerged from this research: interior fabrics, furniture, textile objects and installations characterised by a rich sense of colour, materiality and texture.
Inside Hella Jongerius’ design mind
Throughout the exhibition, numerous archive boxes are opened up: visitors encounter sketches, textile samples and prototypes at close range and, in a sense, step inside Hella Jongerius’ design mind. They see the choices she makes throughout her design process, from commissions for industry to autonomous work. On display are, among other things, fabrics developed for Maharam alongside the corresponding weaving samples, textile samples for KLM’s World Business Class interiors, preliminary studies for textile installations and experiments with colour and three-dimensional weaving. The combination of research material and realised work reveals how ideas, materials and techniques are connected across different periods of Jongerius’ practice.
Visual seduction
The spatial exhibition design by Studio Harm Rensink and Brigitte Coremans provides a stage for Jongerius’ design process and textile projects, full of colour and spatial surprises. Work from different periods is connected through four themes: the dynamic archive, colour, craft and industry, and three-dimensional textiles.
Filmmaker and photographer Roel van Tour brings the textile archive, Jongerius’ way of working and the work of a new generation of designers to life in three poetic films. Together, the films form a visual exploration of Jongerius’ design practice: how she works, both independently and in collaboration with many others.
An archive that is very much alive
With its transfer to TextielMuseum, the textile archive takes on a new role. Whereas Jongerius herself drew on it for many years as a source for new research and designs, it can now also be studied from other perspectives. For Jongerius, the transfer does not mean that the archive becomes a closed chapter.
“Often, an archive belongs to someone who is no longer with us. I am very much alive.” – Hella Jongerius
This idea runs as a thread throughout Smart hands. The archive invites us to look back, while at the same time creating space for new interpretations, research and ideas. Jongerius herself describes the transfer to a museum as a way of putting the archive into an ‘active mode’, allowing others to study it and enabling it to continue to evolve.
The archive remains accessible
Part of Jongerius’ textile archive will also remain accessible beyond the exhibition. In TextielMuseum’s library, visitors can explore the archive during a weekly show & tell, while researchers can consult material by appointment through the Depot on Demand. This pilot anticipates plans for a larger Depot on Demand following the museum’s future renovation.
Hella Jongerius – Smart hands
TextielMuseum, Tilburg
31 October 2026 – 4 April 2027
textielmuseum.nl
Photography: Josefina Eikenaar
