Gerriets-made Art Curtain adorns Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin, USA

Gerriets had a new and exciting opportunity to help realize the fantastic concepts of visionary designer Petra Blaisse and her company Inside Outside. Previous projects with Inside Outside include the Casa da Musica (Porto, Portugal) and the Mercedes-Benz Museum (Stuttgart, Germany).

The Chazen project was a curtain 65 ft wide by 22 feet high (20 m x 7 m) for the interior façade of the museum’s new two-story, glass-walled lobby. A unique and complex process was devised to achieve the curtain’s intricate construction: translucent Trevira CS VOILE was digitally custom-printed with a complex crisscross pattern; 14 widths of felt were precision-cut into strips that were sewn into crisscross configurations; a narrow band of laser scrim was incorporated into the lower third of the curtain; and in the bottom-most section of the curtain a layer of gray silk was attached for opacity.

After a great many hours in the sewing workshop, the curtain was completed and then shipped to the U.S., where it was installed by our U.S. subsidiary, Gerriets International, Inc. in time for the opening of the museum’s new space.

The Chazen curtain is a great success. In addition to fulfilling various functions—sun filtering, glare reduction, acoustic dampening, privacy screening —it also performs as a stunning and dynamic work of art, creating an ever-changing interplay of light and shadow by interacting with the sunlight, interior lighting, and the building’s architecture.

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