Brigitte Engler_Objets Mathématiques (Pédagogiques)_Installation View_Salon Zurcher Part IV_2021
Brigitte Engler’s multi-disciplinary practice embraces what has been marginalized: sidewalk graffiti, craft, the feminine, scientific illustrations, decorative patterns, environmental action, progressive education. The artworks Engler has created over the last 30 years are embedded in various media and support such as ink on paper, thin acrylic paint on plywood panels, wool stitched on embroidery canvas, synthetic dyes in cotton. They form distinct bodies of work that have everything to do with memory, personal and collective from 19th century German pedagogist Friedrich Froebel early childhood education program to community gardens as sites and symbold of the Lower East Side grassroots activism and DIY communities.
Through her engagement with progressive education in an elementary public school where she worked, Engler came across discarded 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, lead 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 participated in arts & crafts workshops and practiced several tie dye and shibori folding patterns. In turn, it fell on her to lead and facilitate with other community members the annual tie dye Solstice workshop where she produced over 10 years a series of folded cloth prints. The early shibori pieces installed in a former tidal mill in Brittany were submerged at high tide and activated her video images and sound piece titled “Shibori Meets the Sea” recorded in the cavernous basement space open to the sea. The immersive art installation was presented with scientific exposés in collaboration with a French government environmental agency which commissioned the artist to conduct several interviews. Her interviews about local eel fishing practices (today European eels are on the list of endangered species)were part of the installation. “Shibori Meets the Sea” was also projected in the alternative gallery “Bullet Space” on the otherside of the Atlantic, on E 3 St. In NYC, the video 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 who was inspired by her series of sidewalk graffiti imprints to write a 4 pages long hybrid essay situating her practice in an art historical context but also playing detective privé to imagine the motivations behind the creative impulse to leave a mark on the city.