Barbara Weil

Barbara Weil (born 1933 in Chicago, Illinois) an artist from the United States, shows relationships between painting, sculpture, contemporary architecture and the human being in unusual ways in her work. In collaboration with Daniel Libeskind she created the architecturally significant Studio Weil in Majorca. The building contains work and exhibition spaces of the artist.

Contents

Life

Barbara Weil was raised in Chicago. She attended Roosevelt University and the Chicago Art Institute. While raising a family she also lived and worked in Southern California, later moving permanently to Majorca, Spain.[1]

Work

At first glance the paintings appear to be American abstract expressionism. Closer examination reveals further perspectives: references to other styles of art and to figurative art, as well as references to classical art themes such as love and the female body. Her graphic œuvre includes self-portraits.

The artist uses both intuition and reason in her process of deconstruction[2]: taking categories of painting, sculpture and architecture, converting them into unexpected forms, mostly of abstract expressionism and even newer art styles. Consistently new interactions are created: painting with primary colors becomes perspectivistic spatial installation – one generation of sculptures reminds of two-dimensional cutouts of paintings, others were developed from materials such as cardboard and paper, which represent two-dimensionality. Keeping ironic distance from art styles, from traditional art production and from established interpretations of art, that what is usually considered separate is blended into an œuvre which sets everything in mental, and sometimes even physical, motion.[3]

A novel blend of art and architecture is constituted by three mobile sculptures, set into motion by the sea breeze that blows through an open gallery cut through the studio building.[4]

Studio Weil

Following the architectural forms found in her painting, Barbara Weil embarked on a series of fiberglass sculptures in 1979.

In 1998, Weil was planning to build a studio when she met the architect Daniel Libeskind. The shared intuition of the architect and the artist resulted in a unique studio space where Weil's art is the inspiration for Libeskind's design.[1] Jonathan Glancey, a well-known architectural critic, mentions Weil and Libeskind as "two artists who, unknowingly, had shared something like a common approach to visual form long before Libeskind became news."[5]

Circles had been an important base of Weil's artistic gesture already in earlier works. Libeskinds involvement with the system of concentric circles, which the philosopher Ramon Llull of Majorca had conceived as an explanation of the world, proved to be the ideal complement.[6]

Giles Worsley, in an article "Beauty without Tears", quoted Libeskind comparing his Studio Weil project with his large buildings: "It's a meditation on art. As opposed to composing a symphony, it's an unaccompanied cello sonata."[7] The studio, with the size of a concentrated museum, permanently exhibits works of Barbara Weil.

Sculptures in Public and in Collections

Literature

Links

References

  1. ^ a b "Biography". Homepage Barbara Weil. Studio Weil. http://www.studioweil.com/inicio.html. Retrieved 2011-04-05. 
  2. ^ Glancey, Jonathan (2003-09-29). "So where’s the kitchen?". The Guardian: url 1, 7. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2003/sep/29/architecture. Retrieved 2011-04-05. "Was I a Deconstructivist before I knew the word?" 
  3. ^ Compare:Gomis, Joan Carles (1995). Galería Barbara Botz, Puerto Andratx. ed. Barbara Weil. Palma de Mallorca. pp. unnumbered. "[…] certain fragments of the painting demanded at a given moment, a particular physical projection in space, and so, without abandoning the original two dimension - yet not limited by this, since Barbara Weil's former sculpture had not needed to be intensified by color - they initiated a gentle flight towards ingravity, obtaining finally the dream of eternal movement […]." 
  4. ^ Glancey, Jonathan (2003-09-29). "So where's the kitchen?". The Guardian: url 1, 9. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2003/sep/29/architecture. Retrieved 2011-04-05. "These dangle inside an open gallery cut through the western end of the building, a theatrical gesture that many architects would dismiss, yet one that makes the building very much Weil's own" 
  5. ^ Glancey, Jonathan (2003-09-29). "So where's the kitchen?". The Guardian: url 1, 9. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2003/sep/29/architecture. Retrieved 2011-04-05. 
  6. ^ Feireiss, Kristin (2000). Kristin Feireiss, Hans-Jürgen Commerell. ed. Mnemonic cartwheels: Daniel Libeskind’s Studio Weil and the work of Barbara Weil. Berlin: Aedes West. 
  7. ^ Worsley, Giles (2004-01-05). "Beauty without tears". The Telegraph: url 1, 14. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3609610/Beauty-without-tears.html. Retrieved 2011-04-05. 
  8. ^ Gomis, Joan Carles (1995). Barbara Weil. Palma de Mallorca: Galería Barbara Botz, Puerto Andratx. pp. unnumbered. "Photo of City of the Big Shoulders"