Fragments (From a Tunic)

Wari · 600-800

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

a: 64.2 × 57.3 cm (25 1/4 × 22 1/2 in.); b: 32 × 14.7 cm (12 1/2 × 5 1/2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Medieval

Fragments (From a Tunic) offers a window into one of the ancient Andes' most visually striking textile traditions, its bold geometric patterning as arresting today as it was fourteen centuries ago. The Wari people, who built a major empire across highland and coastal Peru between roughly 600 and 1000 CE, elevated weaving to the highest form of cultural expression. Their tunics — known as unku — were woven with extraordinary technical precision using a discontinuous warp-and-weft technique that allowed dense, interlocking designs to be built colour by colour without a single thread crossing where it wasn't intended. The imagery, typically featuring abstracted profile figures, stacked faces, and repeating angular motifs in saturated reds, greens, and golds, carried deep ritual and political meaning. Wari tunics were so highly valued that they were placed with the dead as prestige objects, and surviving examples are found in some of the world's most significant museum collections, the Art Institute of Chicago's holdings among the finest. This hand-painted oil reproduction translates the flat woven geometry of the original into richly layered paint, preserving the precision of the composition while giving the colour and form a depth that honours the work's enduring power.