Delicatessen: The Knitted World of Madame Tricot
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In this article
Introduction
Welcome to the seventh article in the Featured Books blog. Each article takes a deep dive into one book, artist or publisher. This week we are looking at Madame Tricot: Delicatessen.
Madame Tricot is the alter ego of Dr Dominique Kähler Schweizer (b. 1949, Paris). She taught herself to knit aged six, then studied medicine and art history at the École du Louvre. She went on to spend forty years as a doctor, psychiatrist and naturopath in Switzerland. Age 62, bored with ordinary knitting, she began knitting food. Her breakthrough was a full-size knitted butcher’s shop, a homage to the boucherie of her childhood. Her work has since been exhibited internationally and featured in Vogue. The pieces include mouldy cheeses, rotting fruit, pigs’ heads and anatomically correct organs combining dark humour and technical virtuosity to explore the line between life and entropy.
Delicatessen presents Madame Tricot's work with superb photographs by Swiss photographer Daniel Ammann. It truly is a feast for the eyes, whether you are a knitter looking for inspiration, a lover of fine art, textile art or photography.
Madame Tricot
Delicatessen
Hardcover
17.4 x 1.4 x 24.9 cm
112 pp
2017
Arnoldsche Art Publishers
RRP £29
Now £15
Synopsis
With her unique artistic installations, Madame Tricot displaces the viewer into an illusory world of knitted delicacies. Her smokehouses, refrigerators, counters of sausage and cheese, and platters of vegetables and desserts are full of wit and irony.
The knitted human heads and anthropomorphic specimens, on the other hand, confront the viewer with the breaking of taboos and surreal allusions. The installation-like staging represents a balancing act of fine art and virtuosic craftsmanship, and draws on the Eat Art movement of the 1960s. The work draws on the 1960s avant-garde Eat Art movement founded in the late 1960s that used food and dining rituals as primary mediums for sculpture, performance, and social critique.
Chapters
Between Fine Art & Craft
Art historian Gabrielle Obrist, former director of the Kunsthalle Wil, sees Madame Tricot as an artist who refuses to pick a side. Her work sits between fine art and craft, drawing on both without fully belonging to either. Because her food can never be eaten, Obrist links it to the object art of Pop Art and Nouveau Réalisme. Her extraordinary technique, by contrast, continues a European tradition of virtuoso knitting that stretches back to the Middle Ages. For Obrist, it is this blend of artistic idea and masterful handiwork that makes Madame Tricot’s creations unique.
Themes & Technique
Life, death and mouldy cheese
Why food, and why so much meat? The answer lies in Dominique Kähler Schweizer's medical training. As a doctor, the boundary between life and death fascinated her, and food, especially meat, sits right on that edge. So she knits only perishable things, and she likes to show them in various states of freshness.
Look closely at any Madame Tricot piece and you will find signs of decay: mould creeping across a salami, a strawberry going soft, a cheese platter complete with its blue veins. She has said that wool lets her say macabre things in a much friendlier way. The humour is just as important as the morbidity. She has knitted terrorists' heads, a sly revenge portrait of a man who wronged her, and pieces mocking reckless cyclists. Kitsch, irony and taboo-breaking are all part of the menu.
No patterns, no seams
Madame Tricot's technique is as unusual as her subject matter. She knits freestyle, with no pattern and no counting of stitches. Every piece is seamless, knitted in one go rather than sewn together from parts, which makes it far harder to achieve. As a result, every object she makes is one of a kind.
She credits her dyslexia with giving her an unusually strong sense of three-dimensional space, which lets her picture a pig's head or an anatomically correct heart before she casts on.
Knitting as therapy
Dominique's psychiatric background gives her a particular view of why knitting matters. She sees its rhythmic, repetitive, two-handed movement as one of the best tools for processing trauma, because it links both halves of the brain.
She describes knitting as Zen and calls it a route to greater awareness. Her motto is a playful twist on Descartes: "I knit, therefore I am."
Biography
A Paris childhood
Dominique Kähler Schweizer was born in Paris in 1949 and grew up in Montmartre, in a family of designers. Food mattered in her household. She has described being raised in a gourmet family with a real knowledge of good cooking, and the local boucherie would later become the inspiration for her most famous piece. She picked up knitting needles at the age of six. Nobody taught her: she worked it out for herself and has never stopped. As a young woman she was torn between art and science. Rather than choose, she did both. She studied medicine while also taking art history at the École du Louvre, a pairing that would shape everything she later made.
Forty years as a doctor
Dominique moved to Switzerland and settled in Wil where she ran her own practice for almost thirty years. She went on to retrain as a psychiatrist, and also practised naturopathy. Her medical career was anything but conventional. With her husband she built a practice that bred its own medicinal leeches, and she even wrote a book on the subject. She also completed a three-year training in psychotraumatology, knitting through every lecture. She has joked that it kept her alert the whole time. Throughout those decades, knitting stayed a private pastime, something she did in the evenings, on buses and on planes.
Enter Madame Tricot
Madame Tricot was born at Christmas 2011. One story has it that she was watching TV chefs prepare a fish and decided she could knit a perfect one herself. She had grown tired of knitting ordinary things, and she discovered that knitting could work in three dimensions. Socks, she has said, would bore her to tears. Her breakthrough came in 2012 with The Knitted Butcher's Shop: a full-size boucherie of hams, sausages and cuts of meat, made as a homage to the butcher's in Montmartre where she grew up. She first displayed it for several months in an empty shop in Wil, and it made her a household name across Switzerland. Within a few years her hobby had become a second career. Once she retired from medicine, she was able to devote herself to it fully.
Influences & Associations
Eat Art
Her installations are often compared to the Eat Art movement of the 1960s, in which artists turned food and meals into art. Critics link her especially to Daniel Spoerri, its founder, whose "snare pictures" fixed the remains of real meals to tabletops.
Dieter Roth and Fischli/Weiss
Like Roth, who made art from chocolate, cheese and sausage that slowly decayed, Madame Tricot is drawn to food's perishability. And like the Swiss duo Fischli/Weiss, she brings deadpan humour to everyday objects.
The still life and vanitas
Tricot's depictions of rotting fruit and mouldy meats recall the old-master vanitas tradition, in which decaying food reminded viewers of their own mortality. Some of her banquets recreate delicacies of the Grand Siècle, France's 17th-century golden age.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
The Swiss writer inspired two exhibitions. One was based on Die Panne (A Dangerous Game), a story in which a lavish dinner turns into a deadly mock trial.
Medicine
Perhaps the most personal influence on the work is anatomy. Her knitted organs, eyes and heads are made with clinical precision, and her anatomically correct knitted heart won an international award.
Awards & Exhibitions
Awards
In 2015 the St. Gallen Cultural Foundation gave Madame Tricot its Förderpreis, a recognition prize for her knitting art. Around the same time, her anatomically correct heart won the Schoppel Knit Award. Exhibitions have followed one after another ever since, in Switzerland and abroad, and her work has appeared in Vogue.
Exhibitions
2025 – Knitted banquet, made with local women's groups, Kobesenmühle, Niederhelfenschwil
2024 – Das post-apokalyptische Festmahl (The Post-Apocalyptic Feast), Kulturpavillon, Wil
2021 – Dürrenmatt's Die Panne (A Dangerous Game), Museümli, Buchs
2020–21 – Zu Tisch (To the Table), Pfäffikon SZ
2019–20 – Savour: Food Culture in the Age of Enlightenment, Gardiner Museum, Toronto
2019–20 – Friedrich Dürrenmatt – Das grosse Festmahl, Centre Dürrenmatt, Neuchâtel
2019 – À table! Que mange la Suisse?, Château de Prangins
2019 – Delicatessen, Musée Visionnaire, Zurich
2019 – Buffet Macabre, Textilmuseum St. Gallen
2018 – Verstrickt & verblümt, Botanical Garden, St. Gallen
2017 – Was isst die Schweiz? (What Does Switzerland Eat?), Swiss National Museum
2014 – Gluschtig glismet, Toggenburger Museum, Lichtensteig
2012 – The Knitted Butcher's Shop, empty shop, Wil
Further Reading
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