BIRD TREES
Artist: Barbara Strasen
Price:
$5,050.00
Medium: Painting
More Details
Creation Date: 2019
Materials: Acrylic, flashe and collage on canvas
Dimensions: 20" x 20"
Condition: New
About the Item: Barbara Strasen manipulates memories by finding the malleable moments of perception. In the “S” series, a figure appears in each painting. Yet, it is only a silhouette, blending into the architecture and backgrounds. For the artist, this figure’s identity and significance are personal. For the viewers, she crafts mysterious worlds. Is the figure going into a cave, or perhaps emerging from it? The exhibition at SEFA Hudson presents three canvases from Strasen’s series. Viewers see this ambiguous figure in a blue architectural drapery, a textured red firestorm and a confetti haze amongst a pastel sky. Her creations reside in an unknown state that echoes the human experience—beginnings and endings, obscurity and clarity.
Strasen states that she seeks “to slow people down and to be surprised.” In her painted lenticular prints, viewers are met with different images as they move across the piece. The works are combinations of multiple images, revealing that perception is not stable: “something is interrupted; something is underneath; something is alive and changing.” Strasen employs both nature and art history, with a particular fondness for Albrecht Dürer’s compositions and cloud formations that mingle with owls and suggestions of foliage.
The artist seeks to “take the ancient things and make them contemporary” and vice versa within her visual practice. Strasen achieves this through painted needlepoint equivalents and collage methods as well. She finds connections between seemingly unlike things within her layering, thus proving a new perspective on reality. In her work NEEDLEPOINT NEUROLOGY, she employs images of brain scans and layers them onto the surface using pigment acrylic and golden paint. The luminescent qualities throughout her work echo the changing and memorizing qualities of stained glass as viewers move throughout the space.
Strasen states that she seeks “to slow people down and to be surprised.” In her painted lenticular prints, viewers are met with different images as they move across the piece. The works are combinations of multiple images, revealing that perception is not stable: “something is interrupted; something is underneath; something is alive and changing.” Strasen employs both nature and art history, with a particular fondness for Albrecht Dürer’s compositions and cloud formations that mingle with owls and suggestions of foliage.
The artist seeks to “take the ancient things and make them contemporary” and vice versa within her visual practice. Strasen achieves this through painted needlepoint equivalents and collage methods as well. She finds connections between seemingly unlike things within her layering, thus proving a new perspective on reality. In her work NEEDLEPOINT NEUROLOGY, she employs images of brain scans and layers them onto the surface using pigment acrylic and golden paint. The luminescent qualities throughout her work echo the changing and memorizing qualities of stained glass as viewers move throughout the space.
About The Artist
Barbara Strasen was born in Brooklyn and raised in the New York area. She received a BFA from Carnegie-Mellon University and an MFA from the University of California at Berkeley, as well as a fellowship to the Yale Summer School of Art.
Strasen has exhibited extensively in Europe and the US since 1968 (beginning with the ground-breaking Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco), achieved numerous public commissions, acted as curator for several exhibitions and has taught at the University of California at San Diego.
Some museum exhibitions include the Whitney Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, MoMA PS1, New York, Fisher Museum of USC, Islip Art Museum, Long Beach Museum of Art, San Diego Natural History Museum and the Allen Art Museum of Oberlin College.
Strasen has recently been awarded a prestigious City of Los Angeles Artist Fellowship Award, and a recent large commission titled Flow & Glimpse, fills the ticketing and departure levels of Los Angeles World Airport’s Terminal 2.
The artist lives and works in Los Angeles.
"Barbara Strasen creates imagery plumbed from the depths of a fertile imagination and a trove of rich memories, in combination with signs, symbols and pictures inspired by advertising, TV, film, signage, billboards, magazines, medical texts and other sources. No image is dismissed as banal or unimportant. It is all important to Strasen, in a kind of hyper-democratic reflection of the insanely complex visual world we inhabit as denizens of the 21st century”. — Susan Eley
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