Brigitte Engler_Objets Mathématiques (Pédagogiques)_Installation View_Salon Zurcher Part IV_2021
Brigitte Engler’s art practice embraces what has been marginalized: sidewalk graffiti, craft, the feminine, scientific illustrations, decorative patterns, environmental action, progressive education. Painting with thin acrylic paint on plywood panels, wool stitched on embroidery canvas, synthetic dyes in cotton, drawing with ink and gouache on paper, she has produced distinct bodies of work that have everything to do with personal memories of the observation of nature (particularly marine biology observed throughout her childhood) and collective memory through her experience of progressive education and the role of play elaborated by the 19th century early education German pedagogist Friedrich Froebel.
Through her engagement with progressive education in an elementary public school where she worked, Engler came across discarded quilts composed of collective geometric collages by first graders also known as Froebel Gifts. The “tile patterns” activated by scissor cuts and torn paper inspired her, a decade later, to enlarge them and create a series of “pre-Bauhaus” geometric paintings. This series titled “Objets Mathématiques ( Pédagogiques)” or “Rhythm and Disruption” in English, leads to think about how art fosters learning through play.
While raising two children on the Lower East Side, Brigitte Engler and family became members of a community garden where they grew flowers and experimented with tie dye and shibori folding patterns during arts & crafts workshops she organized with friends and neighbors. During these workshops, she produced over 10 years a series of folded cloth prints. The shibori pieces were integrated in an immersive art installation in a former tidal mill in Brittany in a region where she spent summers as a child. Submerged at high tide, the fabric works activated her video titled “Shibori Meets the Sea” recorded in the cavernous basement space open to the sea. In preparation for this immersive art installation, Engler had reached out and collaborated with a French government environmental agency which commissioned the artist to conduct several interviews about local eel fishing practices (today European eels are on the list of endangered species). The agency organized a series of artist talks and scientific exposés engaging oyster farmers, local fishermen and neighbors. “Shibori Meets the Sea” was also projected at Bullet Space on the other side of the Atlantic, on E 3 St. in NYC. The video projected in the gallery space was activated by a folded cloth print installed on the clothing line in the garden of the former squat and twirling in the wind.
Currently Brigitte Engler is working on a new project and designing an artist book in collaboration with French writer-art critic Gilles Froger. Inspired by her series of sidewalk graffiti imprints, Froger wrote an essay situating her practice in an art historical context and investigating the motivations behind the creative impulse to leave a mark on the city.