Red and Blue Silk Lowan

This is a silk lowan made in Indonesia in the early 20th century. It is similar to a silk lowan at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. These textiles are hand woven silk that are tie dyed using a special resist technique called tritik that produces well-defined rectangular patterns in the center of the textile.

Lowan textiles gained appreciation in the West during the modernist art movement, because of the similarities between their designs and the abstract minimalist work of  Mark Rothko.