Rare Art Book Skulls Skeletons Pia Federspiel Switzerland Halloween

Description: Rare Art Book: Pia Federspiel Galerie Jamileh Weber Zurich Switzerland 1995. The book measures approximately 13 1/4” by 9 3/8”, contains approximately 70-80 pages and 31 printed skeletal related works. The following information was extracted from a few additional pieces of printed materials found with the book, including a transcript of Johannes Gachnang interviewing Pia Federspiel. With that said, these papers will be included with the lot. When Pia Federspiel took up painting again at the end of the eighties, after a prolonged period of inactivity, she did not pick up where she had left off. Too much had happened in the meantime, since she had studied art and produced her early work in Zurich and Paris, which was still marked by the mood of post-war art. In fact, beginning or beginning again, leading a painter's life with active eyes or with passive, observant detachment are two entirely different situations. Much of Federspiel's art continued as a mute activity even during those years in which it remained entirely latent, existing only as potential, as desire. The pictures she is now showing obviously represent the fruits, not of a hasty move, but of long accumulated experience. They are rooted in a life story and years of visual work quite apart from the influence of recent biographical and artistic impulses. (...) But one cannot speak of indebtedness. Pia Federspiel's artistic approach, i.e., her treatment of reality and means of expression betray a unique signature. Basically, her approach embodies the principles underlying what has been called the tradition of modernism. These entail an analytic attitude and a certain skepticism towards the structure of the world. The heart of the matter hardly lies in what we see. What is visible develops first and foremost through the work of brush and eye. This is all the more plausible when the process is controlled, when single steps are taken in association with structures that are not subject to the vagaries of perception or facile opinion. Pia Federspiel's pictures confront us with reduction both in terms of subject matter and mode of representation. (...) The thoughtfully calculated pictorial form renders things with a compelling closeness that inevitably leads to confrontation, particularly when the artist chooses larger than-life formats for her skulls and bones. The staging of presence is, however, ambiguous: the empty spaces, the indifference of the black, merely serve to underscore and enhance the impact of the pictures. They have an overwhelming immediacy. Understanding comes with the realization that the artist refuses to give her subject matter a thematic context. Skulls are traditionally elements of allegorical tales, such as the Dance of Death. Above all, they figure in still lifes where they appear alongside other things (a book perhaps, or an overturned goblet), and especially in an empirically identifiable place; on a table or a chest of drawers. The skulls in Federspiel's paintings come towards us out of imaginary spaces. Suspended without place, they acquire an intensely heightened appearance. (...) The artist's gaze is matter-of-fact; she harbors no illusions. Her paintings describe the last act. And yet, her gaze is also saturated with sensuality. Her skulls exult in the contrast of color rising out of the darkness. They have chromatic values, structures, swelling volume that fire the power not only of painting but of reality as well. This oeuvre does not appeal to morality, it has no allegorical implications, it does not aestheticize depression and melancholia. On the contrary: the utter frankness of the subject matter sometimes even displays a kind of gaiety. Is it inappropriate? It is one aspect of art's unlimited potential. Except from interview: F: Spirits, that's a big word, but there's only one thing that makes me paint - the possibility of living in another reality, of creating another reality through painting because for me reality.. G: You mean the reality of painting. F: ...yes, that's how I keep afloat. I've had a special kind of fascination for painting ever since I was fifteen; I have always needed pictures painted by different painters, depending on the epoch, to satisfy my needs. G: But in the end you realized that you had to paint the pictures yourself. F: No, I've always painted - since I was fifteen, but with long breaks in-between. My life hasn't been a linear progression, I couldn't do that, just as I can't do a linear sequence of paintings. There are crashes and breaks, I keep having to start all over again. And so I'm painting now. If I think a picture has succeeded, then I try to come to terms with the whole thing from a different angle, like climbing the same mountain again. You take different trails, see different views and panoramas.

Price: 39 USD

Location: Westminster, Maryland

End Time: 2024-05-05T06:01:36.000Z

Shipping Cost: 4.87 USD