Curtains and felt dip drawings

In the 1960s, Rodhe was commissioned for several textile works, and began collaborating with the Association of Friends of Textile Art (Handarbetets vänner). The collection includes numerous sketches and cartoons for these works, including Signs in the Archive (1970) for the National Archives, and Gold and Green Forests (1975-1976) for the Riksbank. The former assignment gave rise to a new theme, Sign Figures, which engendered a vast number of independent works in the form of drawings, objects, tapestries and paintings. They originated in the commission to design a monumental textile work for the National Archives research room, which he received in 1966 and worked on for many years. The Sign Figures were interpretations of mediaeval drawings in book margins that Rodhe had seen in the Archive collections. Despite their terse simplification, these signs look like human characters. They hover above the pictorial surface, illuminated as if by spotlights on a stage, and reflections inject other pictorial planes into the motif. Mirrorings are another theme that the artist has pursued, and while working on his Sign Figures he was at his most playful. Through his collaboration with the Friends, and by employing a simple technique of creating the signs and other pictorial elements with appliqué on the tapestry, he produced a series of smaller textile works, such as Mirror Image (1972). Signs also feature in a series of acrylic glass objects, where the figures are made in a collage technique, all with the title Reflecting Figure (1968) and in a long series of screen prints (The City, 1970), drawings (Studio Door with Curtain, 1972) and paintings The Milliner, 1972). Gold and Green Forests revisits his 1950s experiments with light and shadows among the leaves, strong contrasts and shimmering colours – which Rodhe later used in another set of motifs, Shiva Pattern and Woodland Reflections.