Brigitte Engler_Objets Mathématiques (Pédagogiques)_Installation View_Salon Zurcher Part IV_2021
Artist Statement
My abstract paintings are involved with the manipulation and repetition of pattern in several bodies of work exploring the collective dimension in abstraction. Focusing on the experience of the process as I work with mechanical means of reproduction, I re-present vernacular patterns, precarious and anonymous and oppose to the pure abstraction of thought the physicality of Here and Now.
As I lived in the East Village in the early 80’s, I became immersed in a community of artists, writers and performers. I was inspired by my friendship with artist Kiki Smith who invited me to show my work and introcuced me to her peers and influenced by writer Sylvère Lotringer with whom I collaborated on several projects. Around that time, I started to work at an architect’s woodshop and I became fascinated by recurring plywood patterns propped against the wall all around the shop. As we were allowed to take home some pieces from the discard pile, I started to paint with gouache on small pieces of plywood, incorporating the vein of the wood in the composition. I also traced and carved plywood patterns in a series of hand-printed linocuts to accompany an excerpt from my friend Sylvère’s first autobiographical fiction published as a collaborative artist project by Pataphysics magazine. In the new millenium, my engagement with progressive education at an East Village elementary school my children attended, inspired a series of paintings titled “Objets Mathématiques (Pédagogiques)”. I had admired the children’s geometric collages presented on the walls outside the classroom in large quilt formation. I was attracted to the sissor cuts and torn paper edges and their off-kilter rhythm. At the end of the school year, by chance, I was walking through the corridor when the teacher, who was moving out of the school, was discarding these collective collages that could not be distributed. When he asked me if I wanted to take them, I brought them to my studio and 10 years later, I took them apart and enlarged each tile digitally. This series of abstract paintings on plywood were exhibited in solo shows in New York and in LA. It led to an interest and recent online search for other pre-Bauhaus patterns designed by early german pedagogist Friedrich Frobel like a new series of paintings based on paper-weaving patterns I am currently working on.