Guggenheim Museum - Performance Reflexion

NY-ARTS about Barbara Streiff

Primal geometry – ten symbols found in nature - has been a spiritual awakening and an unending source of inspiration for the Swiss artist Barbara Streiff. Empowered by the symbolic energy in primal geometry, her work reflects all cultures, all religions, and all time.

Barbara Streiff's primal geometry art not only reflects the profound meld of nature and human cultures worldwide, but each piece also symbolizes her own personal passion.

NY-ARTS International

Text by Dr. phil. Astrid Brunner

NY-ARTS Gallery Broadway Staircase Exhibition

Art concept by Barbara Streiff. Art Action in NYC at Broadway - China Down - Grand Station - Central Park and Bronx. Ink paintings from everyday flow on News Paper.

SWISS ARTISTS FROM GLARUS AT BROADWAY IN NYC 2001

Art project by Swiss Artist Barbara Streiff.
Text by Dr. phil Astrid Brunner

SWISS ARTISTS FROM GLARUS IN NYC THE FORGOTTEN CHILDREN OF ART:
75 years of art history visits NYC. The project Swiss Artists From Glarus will show at Gallery Abraham Lubelski 450/473 Broadway, March 6-17, 2001.
The more than 20 artists all live and work in the Swiss mountain valley of Glarus. Last year they teamed up to do a valley-wide exhibition on eight historical sites throughout their mountain Canton. Quite a number of the participating artists are former students and gallery artists of Glarus' Art School Center, Fly Gallery, headed by artist Barbara Streiff in the gods of the old railway station in CH-8750 Glarus in Switzerland.
The NYC exhibit is conceived and organized by the Head of the Glarus Art School Center and Fly Gallery, Barbara Streiff. For the last ten years, she has been working in the cultural heart of Glarus, as artist, sculptor, art teacher, and curator of socio-interactive exhibitions recognized throughout Europe. A major concern is the socio-cultural animation of art - the kind of Vernetzung or Verflechtung that also marks her sculptural work. The Vernetzung/Verflechtung sculptures are now internationally known as AÏON or primae geometrie sculptures. In 1999, Streiff was invited to her AÏON work at the Abraham Lubelski Gallery. Out of this contact the idea of a joint visit in the same gallery emerged.
With writer, art critic and academic Astrid Brunner, the project Swiss Artists From Glarus has found its journalist. Brunner, who commutes regularly between Glarus and Canada, has devoted much of her writing to The Forgotten Children Of Art. This aspect of her art writing is a tribute to her childhood valley.

Anne A. Vogt, art teacher at the Glarus High School. One of her achievements in the Glarus art community was her success in having art at school evaluated on a par with the traditionally more highly evaluated subjects on the academic curriculum, such as mathematics and languages. Her worldwide workshops and performances in the spirit of Buddhism represent the tenth of Tibetans that make up the population of the Canton Glarus. Workshops and performances in Switzerland, Italy, Paris, Germany, GB, Spain, New Zealand, Guatemala, Habitat II Istambul, Tibet China, Amazon Brasil, Borubudur Java. Her newest art work, "Viara-Icones", are microsized prayer paintings in mixed tenique on wood panels, continuums, triptichons and diptichons with spiritual energy through the space as inspiration.
Roberto Koch, a professional computer instructor at the KV Zürich Business School, has assisted the Swiss Artists From Glarus project by designing and constructing for its own commercial website, actually at http://www.alpswissart.ch.
Paul Lohnke, aged 95, is the oldest participant of the Glarus-to-NYC project - the youngest is performance artist Sarah Burger, aged 18. Lohnke's career reaches back to Zürich's Dada art scene of the mid-twenties. "It is only a play with form and color, I never wanted to say anything more than that," he says to this day. He still paints incessantly. Jakob Schneider lives in the hindmost village of the Glarus valley. He paints religious allegories and expressionist landscapes; his technical handling of chiaroscuro reminds of Segantini. A poor boy from the alps, he later, as a young artist, managed to travel all over Europe. A portion of his allegorical work is installed permanently at a church in Stuttgart. Though Swiss Artists From Glarus presents a multiplicity of styles, the overall project is a coherent whole born from the mutual respect for each other's work amongst the participating artists. The naturalistic approach is seen in the watercolors of Sr. Hadwig Vogel, the large silk and cotton batique canvases of Heinz Bächler, the natural stone sculptures of Hansueli Knobel; a number of artists work in expressionist to abstract techniques in various media and diverse professions, such as architecture, jewelry, teaching, graphic design, sculpting, performing, and photography. Fridolin Walcher is a realist photographer whose special approach and themes put him at the forefront of the European photographic scene. He also works on commissions for industry and tourism.Very different is photographer Ruth Zweifel. Her poetic photo-pictures are meticulous and highly skilled technically. Her subjects are the landscape of the Glarus valley, its mountains and distinct natural character traits. Heinz Bächler pursues the same theme, but extends the natural world into often anthropomorphised fairy-tale dimensions. Bächler's work is historically significant as well in that it tunes in with the age-old textile industry for which the Canton of Glarus is famous worldwide. Susan Honegger takes as her concerns with the traditional Glarus textile industry inside the textile factories. In an expressionist-poetic style she sketches, draws, and paints its history from inside out. After years of rendering the local textile history, she has ended up working in a totally abstract style based on the rudimentary tools of industrial textile making - spindle, warp and woof. Architect Pierre Haefelfinger presents himself in a purely abstract manner with his Slidepictures, with which he invites the viewer to touch and manipulate his movable paintings and to rearrange them constructively into new individual constellations. Armin Simon's monochrome paintings, worked with pigments made from scratch, present a reductio ad absurdum of abstract technique and thinking. The almost fundamentalist purism of this artist is well illustrated by his painstakingly constructed website. Greth Spälty's work lives from the structure of color put on in layers, which are then incised in various techniques. Her untitled work is a kind of radical expressionism. Sculptor Alfred Knobel jun. works in extreme 3-D abstractionism, which amounts to a direct inner dialogue with the essence of any given rock material. The logical radical step of this dialogue is to deconstruct the stone to its powdery particles, which are then painted on plexiglass surfaces. Design-jeweller and interior designer Peter Oberholzer works in precious metals, mostly on one-of-a-kind commissions. His abstraction are not unlike the cut precious stones that are part of his art material.
Barbara Streiff and her Glarus Art School Center presents tachist and surrealist student work with Heidi van Sprundel, Valerio Manfré, and Martha Mayhensek. Heidi van Sprundel with her fantasy pictures from trees, flowers, women and landscapes she gives back her sensitive impressions of nature, expression in strong bright colors and forms. Her technique is mixed in different coats, colors and styles. Valerio Manfré favorites are the motion paintings in surrealism. In a long time process, he brings the 3d dimension in his intuitive paintings. Martha Mayhensek, her mystic paintings tell the story of her live. Her concentration of color and form is like a ritual of intuition. Her favorite technique is to paint with selfproduced pigmented colors and the use of different materials.
Many of the youngest Glarus artists showing in NYC have been formed by the Glarus Art School Center with Barbara Streiff's Fly Gallery, either as students or exhibitors, often both. Another influence is Anne A. Vogt, art teacher at the Glarus High School. Owing to these influences are Katrin Hotz, Ingrid Käser, Frederick Rossmann and Sarah Burger. These are the new generation of Glarus artists - sculptors, graphic designers, performers - some of whom already with exhibitions and art studies throughout Europe to their credit.
The future of The Forgotten Children of Art from Glarus may not be forgotten, thanks to the chance given them by Abraham Lubelski's invitation to host their work in his international gallery space on 450/473 Broadway, NYC, March 6-17, 2001.


MORE ABOUT THE ARTIST/PUBLISHER OF NY ARTSMAGAZINE INTERNATIONAL

ABRAHAM LUBELSKI

Abraham Lubelski was born in Siberia in the USSR in 1940. In 1950 he immigrated to the United States with his parents. He became a U. S. citizen in 1954. Mr. Lubelski has been a professional artist for more than four decades and over the years has worked back and forth between painting, conceptual projects and installatons. In 1969 he completed a number of street works and performances in conjunction with the Architecture League of New York which were written up in Life and People magazines. In the 1970‚s, among his other projects, he developed theater set designs. In the late 70‚s and early 80‚s Mr. Lubelski exhibited at the Neill Gallery in SoHo. Since the 1980‚s Mr. Lubelski has exhibited internationally on a regular basis. He has exhibited in Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, and Hamburg, and, as well, in Poland, Japan, and various countries in South America. In conjunction with these exhibitions a number of catalogues have been produced and reviews have appeared in such international publications as Flash Art. Since 1990 Mr. Lubelski has managed several exhibition spaces on Broadway in SoHo in New York City. He has used the spaces to give exhibitions to underrepresented artists (from the U. S. and abroad) and has, in addition, sponsored the visits to the United States of numerous international artists.