Description: Award-winning tapestry artist's site, with galleries of works
tapestry (170) tapestries (70) pilar coover (1) pilar sans coover (1)
Featured Works The Magic Flute Pilar's Forest Mythological Women Christian Fairy Tales Storytellers Drawings Other Works Statement Exhibitions Awards Contact
Pilar Sans Coover was born María del Pilar Sans Mallafré in the old Roman city of Tarragona, Spain, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War on 16 September 1936, the Catalan daughter of a doctor and a poet, and she grew up there during the repressive Franco years. After university training in Barcelona as a biologist and some years as a classical guitarist, she turned to fiber art in the early 1970s, and over the subsequent decades, using thousands of different threads gathered on her travels as her palette,
Her approach has been to seek to transcend the limitations of traditional needlework by opening every possibility between thread and canvas, remarking in an interview that "I feel as free to move my needle as a painter his brush, and as a painter mixes his paints, I'll combine any yarn, thread, whatever goes through a needle, to create the desired design and texture, my central aim being to combine as much as possible the fluidity and spontaneity of painting with the warmth and textural richness of textile.