Brigitte Engler_Objets Mathématiques (Pédagogiques)_Installation View_Salon Zurcher Part IV_2021
Artist Statement
In my art practice, I explore the collective dimension in abstract art in several bodies of work, in paintings on plywood, stitched pieces, art installations, monumental rubbings and prints and artist books. In “Rhythm and Disruption”, originally titled in French “Objets Mathématiques ( Pédagogiques)”, a recent series of abstract paintings on plywood or in stitched pieces in wool on embroidery canvas from the early 1990’s, I re-present everyday life patterns, precarious and anonymous, collected haphazardly. Focusing on the experience of the process, I work with mechanical and digital means of reproduction such as pochoir, embroidery, silkscreen, drawing transfer, rubbing, shibori, linocut, laser photocopy and “oppose, in cultural theorist and writer Sylvère Lotringer’s words, to the abstraction of thought the physicality of Here and Now“.
The hard edge paintings on plywood painted with thin gouache acrylic, using masking tape to delineate geometric shapes activated by scissor cuts and torn edges, were inspired by discarded tile patterns by school children, cut and pasted on paper as a group activity and assembled into large paper quilts. At year’s end, I was walking through the school corridor as the teacher, who was moving out, was discarding them and he asked me if I wanted to take them with me. He knew me as a parent and an artist facilitating curriculum-based art and architecture workshops in the school. I had admired the collages for their syncopated rhythm when they were exhibited outside the classroom. Several years later for a solo exhibition at Key Club, artist Robin Winters’ project space in Soho, I took the quilts apart and enlarged each tile on a laser photocopier before transferring the pattern on plywood. The pre-Bauhaus tile patterns, originally designed as pedagogical tools by the 19th century early childhood German pedagogue Friedrich Fröbel, are also known as Fröbel Gifts.