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Barbara Roth |
The Baukunst Galerie opens at Wednesday, the 1st of June 2005 from 18.00 to 21.00 p.m. with an introduction by Sibylle Omlin, art historian in Zurich, a great solo-exhibition of new works by the Swiss artist and sculptor Barbara Roth: Current sculptures of chrome steel and brass are presented in the garden of the gallery. New wooden objects and works on paper will be shown within the rooms of the gallery. For the first time the Baukunst Galerie exhibited the sculptural work of this sculptor in summer 2000 in connection with the work of the sculptor Gunter Frentzel. In 2001 followed a further exhibition in Cologne at the “Trinitatiskirche”.
Barbara Roth was born 1950 in Basel. After her studies of architecture from 1971 to 1974 at the ETH Zurich, she was educated by the sculptor Peter Meister in Zurich form 1979 to 1980. Roth won several scholarships of art and realized divers works in public space. Her opus was already shown in several solo-exhibitions amongst others 1997 at the “Galerie Kornfeld”, Zurich, 2000 at the “Stiftung für Eisenplastik, Sammlung Dr. Hans Koenig”, Zollikon, and at last 2004 at “Die Halle - Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst\" in Langnau a. A. (CH). Barbara Roth lives and works in Zurich.
In her work Barbara Roth broaches the issue of visionary and real space concepts. The works presented in the exhibition can be assigned to three groups: Large metal sculptures, which can be classified between sculpture and architecture, ground- and wall-objects and works on paper:
Barbara Roth already plays with adumbrations in her metal sculptures, which have been created since 1993. Her sculptures are more a subtle hint at imaged worlds than a precise architecture. In the first instance Roth is using feathered wire and cupper, whereas she is utilizing splendent chrome steel and green patinated brass in her current sculptures. Since her sculptures out of slender rods are very filigree, they seem like drawings in space. Roth is demonstrating that limitation can bring forth wideness: In the imagination of the viewer the lines can be connected to pieces of architecture, which alter with every change of perspective. By this game of perception the works of this artist can initiate to reconsider our own habits of vision.
The new wooden objects of Barbara Roth, which have been added to her metal sculptures during the last three years, are also confronting the observer with questions: The drawings with black pigment on waxed wooden boards and the groups of wooden quarters of different size and design remind on the one hand on architectural maps or urban development models and on the other hand on game boards. Titles like "Spielbrett" (game board) or "Schachbrett" (chessboard) support that connotation, whereas titles like "traffic", "Raumkomplex" (space complex) or "Strömungen" (streams) refer to real settings or projected compositions. Roth also adds alphabetic characters and whole words in her latest works. Therefore she uses selfmade stencils, which are designed like the old-fashioned inscribitions of the cargo-containers. In most instances the alphabetic characters refer to cardinal points and the words refer to imagined or real locations, for example cities (eg. "babylon"), rivers (e.g. "amazonas") or geographical areas (e.g. "sahara").
Roth’s drawings, which adumberate construction by their feathery lines, are recently completed by collaged works of paper, which are manual embossed by the method of nitro print. All kinds of fragments are mixed up with symbols from sketches and architectural diagrams like arrows and lines of demarcation.
Barbara Roth‘s works of art open up a space between reality and the world of imagination and games. They are located between immediate availability on the one hand and the missing practicability on the other hand. They request an open mind for the imagined entering in virtual dimensions. They are picture puzzles and at the same time architectures of own worlds, questioning our perception as much as our organizing, creating, designing and constructing of the world we live in.
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