About the exhibition

External exhibition of the Rýmařov Town Museum in the building of the textile company HEDVA ČESKÝ BROKÁT

In 1890, above the then Císařská (today's Opavská) street in Rýmařov, the brothers Adolf and Franz Schiel founded a silk company called Gebrüder Schiel. A successful company for the production of silk products (ties, dress fabrics, brocades, etc.) gradually grew to its present size. After 1945, it was confiscated as German property, merged with other smaller companies and, with its headquarters in Moravská Třebová, renamed Henap, Brokát and finally Hedva. Today, the Hedva Český Brokát company still operates, and its long and complex history marked by "ups and downs" is remembered by the external exhibition of the Rýmařov museum, which is open to visitors three days a week from May to September.

The first indoor exhibition about weaving in the premises of the textile company was created by its designer Martina Kohoutková in 2013. It also included a brocade and sample room and a reinstalled Prague shop of neckwear in the art deco style.

Two years later, the employees of Hedva and the Rýmařov Town Museum, in cooperation with the Polish partner Museum Wsi Opolskiej in Opole, jointly opened an exhibition entitled The History of Textile Industry in the Rýmařov Region, including an exhibition of photographs from an international photography competition on the subject of Textiles. This was funded by the grant from the Praděd Euroregion for the project called "Beauty That Veils".

In 2019, the tour route was expanded with an exhibition focusing on technology and fabric production called How Fabric Is Made, which is located in the authentic industrial space of the former preparation plant with original columns and cog-shaped skylights. In it, you can see original machines, historical objects, looms and contemporary brocade products. At educational panels, the visitor learns about textile materials, silk production or, for example, what it is made of and how the jacquard loom works. The author of the concept, Martina Kohoutková, together with Kamila Pánková and her students from the art department of the ZUŠ, accompanied the exhibition with original works thematically related to textiles. The project "Rýmařov and Prudnik - towns of weavers. Common heritage" received support from the micro-projects fund of the Praděd Euroregion.

Since 2019, the exhibition has been included in the Moravian-Silesian Tourism, s. r. o. project, specifically the Raw Beauty Technotrasa project, which aims to draw attention to the specific beauty of technical monuments. Thanks to this, the exposition succeeds in being promoted throughout the region, even beyond its borders. https://technotrasa.cz/