Reconstruction 10.1 (2010)
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LEGEND - A graphic tale of the love generation's hippie's sixties started at Haight Ashbury, San Francisco / Christina and Barie Fez-Barringten; Artwork by Christina with Barie's narrative
Preface
Book is to be printed in color with full-page picture of artwork on the left and on the facing page the description. Left sheet picture and right sheet description so that the reader may see the full-page color picture while reading the description at the same place.
Christina's pop art collages are now available as fine art inkjet giclée printed reproductions as the entire collection of the originals is being kept as part of the artist's estate. This is being done to preserve their integrity and the value of their importance. Each of the fine art giclées is individually signed and dated as part of any connoisseurs fine art collection. Each is truly one of a kind, unique and remarkable in achievements. With the advent of digital photography and the slow demise of mechanical lithography, digital inkjet high-end printing is expanding exponentially. Giclée loosely means spraying or squirting in French. Christina's collage giclées are characteristic of a true digital art print:
1) The use of archival pigmented inks
2) The use of archival fine art papers (i.e. canvas, watercolor)
3) An inkjet printer with professional grade nozzles
4) Individual color profiling for each paper
Christina's Giclées Collages
combines the beauty and brilliance of this printing technology with the
use of pigments and the variety in paper types from canvas to
watercolor or satin papers. While photographic prints are somewhat dull
and limited in paper choices, a giclée print on canvas, watercolor or
other substrates will make photos and paintings jump out with deep
blacks, saturation and gradations hard to achieve with other media.
This current offering is in glossy laminate.
While the techniques of collage were
first used at the time of the invention of paper in China around 200
BC, the use of collage remained very limited until the 10th century in
Japan, when calligraphers began to apply glued paper, using texts on
surfaces, when writing their poems. Her work cries out for words and
music only to be found by the viewer. In the 19th century, collage
methods also were used among hobbyists for memorabilia (i.e. applied to
photo albums) and books (i.e. Hans Christian Andersen, Carl
Spitzweg).In this way Christina's home is filled family photo collages.
It is her natural way to express her ideas and relationships of people,
places and events. The term collage derives from the French "colle"
meaning, "glue". This term was coined by both Georges Braque and Pablo
Picasso in the beginning of the 20th century when collage became a
distinctive part of modern art.
Introduction
Art of the so-called Love Generation are Impressions of the
psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the sixties. Christina's Psychic
Automatism is graphic memoirs made during the sixties. While they seem
to be Pop Art, Surreal, and Fantasy Metaphors, they are really a
re-assemblage of deconstructed reality.
Christina's Giclées Collages combine the beauty and brilliance of this
printing technology. While photographic prints are somewhat dull and
limited, a giclée print make her collages pop with deep blacks,
saturation and gradations difficult to achieve with other media. Her
jet-printed glossy laminate.
"As she broke the Plexiglas into fragments, she too tore the magazine's
pages. As she reassembled the Plexiglas fragments to a form a new
reality, so she assembled the bits and pieces of magazine sheets to
form metaphors of spirit, fashion, urbanism, and a fantasy life and
into a visual memoir of the Love Generation".
The Baby Boomers of today grew up in the midst of the greatest cultural revolution of our time. A revolution, which emerged out of the beat generation and into the hippies creativity in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury and England's Soho. It was the beginning of the youth culture, where being over thirty was ancient.
Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, sounds, feelings, and impressions of her three creative days between Yale's school of architecture and Manhattan's "art scene". She did this in Puerto Rico, while TV programs like: "Laugh In" and the first run of Star Trek were airing in the states. At Yale, they gave a lecture series published as Architecture the Making of Metaphors encouraged by Dean Charles Moore with John Cage, Paul Weiss, Robert Venturi and others. At the time, Timothy Leary was advocating the wonders of LSD while the young were tripping out on Broadway and loving at Woodstock. Society listened to acid rock and painted psychedelic illustrations and paintings. They listened while crowds proclaimed against the Vietnam War to "Make Love and Not War" while the musical Hair reaped in millions at the box office. The streets of New Haven were charged with "blacks" rioting against the "establishment". Christina dressed in her own designs and high fashion minis and soaked in the psychedelic sounds of Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, the Bee Gees, the Beatles and other like the Mamas and the Papas. All the while, she collected the many magazines she would later use in her collages. She and her husband made graffiti and gorilla art on buildings, malls and with posters in their apartment and the buildings in Puerto Rico.
Christina's Pop Art collages are a part of the visual artistic movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain. It paralleled in the late 1950s in the United States. The early 50s was a time when Christina had to flee from East to West Germany, leaving her home city of Leipzig. A city once known for its commerce, music and literature. Christina was born and educated in Leipzig and its surrounding area. It was the home of Gutenberg, Luther, Bach, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Handel, Klinger, Goethe's Faust "Auerbach's Keller", just to mention a few. Its neighboring small town is Dessau, the seat of the Bauhaus design movement. Christina grew up in an atmosphere of great music and art. She draws upon that culture and the sensitivities of grace and tenacity of that time, which is rarely found in today's politically correct generation.
Pop Art is one of the major art
movements of the Twentieth Century. Characterized by themes and
techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising and
comic books. Pop Art is widely interpreted as either a reaction to the
then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism or an expansion upon
them. Christina was the first artist to use Plexiglas (acrylic). Her
sculptures are amazing examples of three dimensional abstract
expressionism and movement in the transparency of space. She studied
sculpture under Peter Augustino at Columbia University.
While Pop Art, like pop music, aimed to
employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art,
emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture,
Christina's work challenged this mundane idea with her passion for
harmony, grace and balance. She demonstrated that the two could work
together and that "deconstructivism", Dada and Surrealism could be made
popular with the jargon of the reality of the world of
fashion and cosmopolitan urbanism.
Christina's giclée collages are
her response to Abstract Expressionism
and marked a return to representational art. She uses images from mass
culture and ordinary commerce as a relatively new development. In fact,
her work incorporates the shapes and forms of her abstract
expressionist foundations, where each piece is a whole shape consisting
of abstract forms arrayed in a kaleidoscope of shapes and forms in
tension and counter tension dynamics and repose.
While Christina loathes any social preoccupation with psychoanalysis,
her work is pure imagination drawn from her own pure psychic
automatism, by which she proposes to express the real
functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all
control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral
preoccupation. She practices what the philosopher Husserl known as the
father of phenomenology of subjective experience as the source of all
of our knowledge of objective phenomena.
Christina's Psychic Automatism is a
surrealist technique involving spontaneous assemblage without conscious
aesthetic or moral self-censorship. Automatism phenomena is perhaps
parallel to the non-idiomatic improvisation of free jazz.
Christina's Collage surrealism is based
on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously
neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the
disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other
psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the
principal problems of life.
Christina's mass image art combines
eclectic mysticism, current high-end fashion metaphors
and values of her real and exaggerated impression of the society values
around her. With each completed piece, we see the combined segments of
what man has made out of modern reality. Each piece reifies the
potential of the combination of the segments to its aesthetic
conclusion. As she breaks and reassembles fragments of Plexiglas to
form her sculptures, so she cut apart the fashion magazines of the
early sixties and reassembled them to compose their own personality. In
style, many of her collages are absolutely baroque and busting with
dynamic life and exuberance. Her work is in the genre of other pop
artists, such as English pop artist Sir Peter Thomas Blake and Richard
Hamilton; as well as Norwegian artist, Hariton Pushwagner. The
tactility and appeal of each of her pieces is irresistible as the
origins of each segment. She has made of each much more than they were
in their original form and, have immortalized what was once discarded
and swept away with time.
Like all the pop artists of her time, Andy Warhol,
Rauschenberg, and Liechtenstein, Christina delights in using, reusing
and converting the obvious into the new. This fact remains true also in
her acrylic paintings. She is a true maker of metaphors,
making the strange familiar and communicating one thing in terms of
another. Formally trained also as a fashion illustrator at the New York
Art Students League, she uses the figures, costumes and textures to
recreate styles and fashion looks of the dream world. Each image is
bizarre and somewhat extraterrestrial, with the art of a Spielberg or
Jim Henderson's Muppets; each becomes both the reality of our world and
some other.
Christina Fez-Barringten is an
international artist. She has exhibited her work in New York City,
Connecticut, Tennessee, Florida, Europe and the Middle East.
Living in New York, Christina and her contemporary artists (Andy
Warhol, Rauschenberg, Liechtenstein, Peter Augustino and so many
others) opted to present the obvious in the new, a principle that
remains true also in Christina's dynamic acrylic paintings, and in her
first of its kind acrylic sculptures. Rather than selling the
originals, Christina offers her collages as giclées. The printing
technology of the fine art ink jet giclées brings out the beauty and
brilliance of her collages. The nature of a giclée print let her
collages jump out with deep blacks, saturation and gradations, hard to
achieve with other media. Art of the Love Generation are Impressions of
the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the 1960s. It seems Christina's
collages are also an expression of Pop Art, Surrealism, Fashion-Fantasy
or Metaphoric-Urbanism. Yet her works are in reality a re-assemblage of
deconstructed impressions of the 1960s. Her collages derived from
Cut-Outs of magazine sheets, like Harpers Bazaar and Vogue, mirroring
the face of that magical period. Christina created this collection of
collages in 1968, regurgitating pent up sights, feelings and
impressions of that time. Her work is timeless and like a hidden
treasure yet to be fully discovered.
Pop Art is a major art movement of the
Twentieth Century drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising
and comic books. While Pop art, like pop music, aimed to employ images
opposed to elitist culture in art, and emphasizing the banal or kitschy
elements of the culture; Christina's work challenged this depressing
idea with her passion for harmony, grace and balance. She believed the
two could work together and that "deconstructivism"; Dada and
Surrealism could be combined into the jargon of the world of fashion
and cosmopolitan urbanism. Christina's modern art is very easy to
comprehend.
She was far ahead of her time when she used images from mass culture
and ordinary commerce in her work. Realism and Minimalism are
considered to be the current modern art movements. Her collages are a
response to Abstract Expressionism and marked already then a return to
representational art. San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, England's Soho
and Woodstock stirred the beat generation and hippy's to bring about
the greatest cultural revolution of our time; of which Christina's
collages are one of the finest examples.
Barie Fez-Barringten was born 1937 in New
York. He attended Christopher Columbus High School. He received his
Bachelor of Fine Arts in interior design from Pratt Institute. After
several years of working for such architects as Edward Durrell Stone
and Morris Lapidus, and a year of extensive travel throughout Europe,
he returned to the US to continue his studies. By 1968 he received his
Masters degree in architecture from Yale University.
Shortly before moving to New Haven to begin his studies, Barie was
introduced to Christina Lefson. Christina lived at the International
House, a home for graduate students on Riverside Drive. She studied
Fine Arts at Columbia University and Howard Cook, then, president of
the International House, graciously arranged for Christina to have a
large art studio in the same building, where she could work and develop
her new kind of sculptures.
Her medium was Plexiglas, which had never been used in fine art
sculptures.
David Rockefeller commissioned her work to be exhibited at the Chase
Manhattan Bank. Other exhibitions followed such as the Frank Lawrence
Gallery at East 57 Street and Park Avenue, which showed and represented
her abstract sculptures; which, thanks to her medium, and her artistry,
are not like conventional sculptures where volume is inserted into
space which surrounds them. Rather, they have become part of space as
air, color and light play through it.
Christina was born in Leipzig, Germany. In 1956 she came to New York to
study philosophy. But when she discovered the powerful and inspiring
movement of Modern Art in New York City, and learned about Andy Warhol.
Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Liechtenstein, and, others. She decided to use
her artistic talent and changed her goals to study Fine Art at both the
Art Students League and School of Visual Arts.
Shortly before she intended to return to Germany, Christina was
introduced to Paul Lefson by Max Waldman, a theatrical photographer
(well known for his book "Waldman on Theater", and his photos in Life
Magazine). Paul and Christina got married in 1958 and lived on East 31
Street in Manhattan. Sadly, Paul Lefson died accidentally while on
business in Chicago early in 1963.
To overcome this devastating loss, Christina turned to her art more
than ever. She now studied sculpture at Columbia University under
Professor Peter Augustini. During this period, Christina learned of
Barie Fez-Barringten.
Barie and Christina married in 1966 in New Haven, while Barie studied
at Yale University, under Paul Rudolf, Charles Moore, Vincent Scully
and others. In 1967, Barie defined the theory of " Architecture the
Making of Metaphors". At that time Barie conducted a lecture series at
Yale University with Robert Venturi, John Cage, Paul Weiss, Christopher
Tunnard, and others. This event is partially published in "Main
Currents of Modern Thought".
After the completion of Barie's studies in February of 1968, the couple
moved for a short while (to escape the cold of winter) to Puerto Rico.
Barie was appointed junior partner of Schimmelpfennig, Ruiz and
Gonzales and designed buildings for Ron Rico and El Mundo.
In Puerto Rico, Christina developed a series of original and exciting
collages. She was inspired by the most elaborate, rich and opulent
editions of the 1960's - Harper's Bazaar and Vogue Magazines.
These collages are excellent posters and are now shown for the first
time on the Internet.
Back in New York, in order for Barie, now, a licensed architect to do
his work, and Christina to have space for her sculptures, the couple
moved into a large loft on East 68 Street. Barie taught architecture at
the Pratt Institute. And, when Barie accepted the challenge of Mayor
Lindsey to bring the first ""Earth Day" to New York City, he encouraged
his students to build the stage for that event. Paul Newman and people
from Sesame Street, Aly McGraw and others furnished the educational
entertainment. The following year John Mc Connell enlisted Barie's
assistance to again stage the Earth Day event in Central Park and to
get the General Secretary of the United Nations, U Thant, to proclaim
Earth Day as an international holiday (March 21st).
In addition, Barie founded a New York not-for-profit corporation called
"Laboratories for Metaphoric Environments". One of this groups primary
goals was to provide under privileged children a glimpse of the
creative excitement within the building industry. From cabinet work, to
carpentry and design. In order to illustrate his teaching, he produced
a series of words-drawings, which are now in the hands of several
collectors.
In 1973, Barie accepted the challenge to develop two vacation resorts
in Tennessee; Sugar Tree and English Mountain. In addition, he designed
homes for a development in Belmopan, Belize, British Honduras.
Barie, the artist, developed a series of brilliantly envisioned
drawings of futuristic metaphors, which he exhibited in conjunction
with Christina's Plexiglas sculpture, at the Jonathan Gallery in
Jackson, and in Memphis, Tennessee.
Later, he was recruited by the "Gulf Oil Real Estate Development
Company" to be its lead project manager for a new computer building and
other new structures in Texas. The couple moved to Houston for this
work. Also, Barie, was always interested in inspiring young people in
his profession, taught part-time at the University of Houston; and,
later, fulltime, as associate professor at college station's Texas
A&M University. Professor Fez-Barringten student's benefited by
his friendship with the astronaut Joe Allen. Together they looked way
into the future and designed space stations furniture and other
imagined designed necessities.
By 1981 the Fez-Barringtens moved from Texas to Saudi Arabia where
Barie trained Saudi Arabian students to work in architecture department
of The Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO).
After moving to Riyadh, Barie got busy and designed 21 new towns for
the people of Saudi Arabia. He also designed sport stadiums, office
buildings and other building types.
In Riyadh Christina developed, out of necessity a new style of
pattern-like paintings. For in this Muslim country objects cannot be
portrayed through art. In 1986, Christina gave a major exhibition of
her acrylic paintings sponsored by the American Ambassador in Saudi
Arabia. In addition she taught and was the judge of important art
events, especially during the five years when Barie was Professor of
Architecture at King Faisal University, located in Dammam on the Gulf
of Arabia. Professor Barie Fez-Barringten's articles of metaphors,
written during that time, are published in learned journals in the USA,
Middle East and Europe. In 1999 the Fez Barringten's left Saudi Arabia.
1. Appetite
This collage expresses the unsatiated hunger, appetite,
longing and dreams of mankind for all the tangibles.
The printing technology of the fine art inkjet giclées brings out the
beauty and brilliance of her collages.The nature of a giclée print let
her collages jump out with deep blacks, saturation and gradations, hard
to achieve with other media. Art of the Love Generation are Impressions
of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the 1960s. It seems Christina's
collages are also an expression of Pop Art, Surrealism, Fashion-Fantasy
or Metaphoric-Fiction. Yet her works are in reality a re-assemblage of
deconstructed impressions of the 1960s. Her collages derived from
cutouts of magazine sheets, like Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, mirroring
the face of that magical period. Christina created this collection of
collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, feelings and impressions
of that time. Her work is timeless. And, like a hidden treasure yet to
be fully discovered.
2. Taproots
This collage incorporates the shapes and forms of an abstract
expressionist foundation. It is a kaleidoscope of shapes and forms in
tension and counter tension, dynamics and repose. This work is pure
imagination depicting automatism and repetition by which to express a
real function of thought.
Art of the Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and
Hip-art of the 1960s. It seems Christina's collages are also an
expression of Pop Art, Surrealism, Fashion-Fantasy or
Metaphoric-Fiction. Yet her works are in reality a re-assemblage of
deconstructed impressions of the 1960s. Her collages derived from
cutouts of magazine sheets, like Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, mirroring
the face of that magical period. Christina created this collection of
collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, feelings and impressions
of that time. Her work is timeless and like a hidden treasure yet to be
fully discovered.
3. Kiss
Lips, heads, and flowers orbit a sky surrounding an eye
looking at the yellows, cerulean blues, lavenders and burgundy rainbow.
Each are made a family of separated identities in a new structure of
this kiss context. The clouds of color carry the content of the figures
in an artist's pallet of complementary hues and tones. All of these
images are created in a spontaneous surreal technique called
Automatism.
Automatism is a surrealist technique involving spontaneous writing,
drawing, or the like practiced without conscious aesthetic or moral
self-censorship. "Pure psychic automatism" was how André Breton,
surrealism's founder, defined surrealism, and while the definition has
proved capable of significant expansion, automatism remains of prime
importance in the movement. Seeing many of Christina's works one
immediately thinks of Duchamp's "Nude Descending the staircase".
Duchamp discusses his work saying, `I discarded brushes and explored
the mind more than the hands.'
Christina's work speaks across centuries, cultures and genres. To own
her work is to possess a still life of importance and value.
4. Opulent
The focal point is a well dressed aristocrat surrounded by white horses, damsels and exotic dogs as a clouds of ochre, persimmon, blues and gold. Art of the so-called Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the sixties. Christina's Psychic Automatism is graphic memoirs made during the sixties. While they seem to be Pop Art, Surreal, Fantasy Metaphors they are really a re-assemblage of deconstructed reality. Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, sounds, feelings, and impressions of her three creative days between Yale's school of architecture and Manhattan's "art scene". She did this in Puerto Rico while TV programs like:" Laugh In" and the first run of Star Trek was airing in the states. At Yale they gave a lecture series published as "Architecture the Making of Metaphors" encouraged by dean Charles Moore with John Cage, Paul Weiss, Robert Venturi and others. At the time Timothy Leary was advocating the wonders of LSD while the young were tripping out on Broadway and loving at Woodstock. Society listened to acid rock and painted psychedelic illustrations and paintings. They listened while crowds proclaimed against the Vietnam war to "Make Love and Not War" while the musical Hair reaped in millions at the box office.
5. Quixote
Like the famous legend of Don Quixote de la Mancha the lady is dressed in warrior black with a great black hat. The images are a quiet story of the pride and proclamation of knight hood of great and single purpose. Collage is the making of metaphors, which make the strange familiar. Quixote is now a person who is victorious and the metaphor is the bits and pieces of constructed reality combined into the new reality of this surreal automatic expression. Like its Haight Ashbury Love generation contemporaries this work conjures and freely lets psychic and poetic realities become a medulla upon which to feast the eyes and heart. The Baby Boomers of today grew up in the midst of the greatest cultural revolution of our time. A revolution, which emerged out the beat generation into the hippies creativity in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury and England's Soho. It was the beginning of the culture of youth where being over thirty was ancient.
6. Mystery
As the period, this collage restates the metaphors of a
culture, past and future in the form of women in exotic and colorful
costumes. Are they gypsies, nobility, or part of a kings harem?
Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating
pent up sights, sounds, feelings, and impressions of her three creative
days between Yale's school of architecture and Manhattan's "art scene".
It is a collage of bobbles, bangles and beads with surreal double
images and decorated faces hiding the true identity of the one person
they represent. Everywhere there are hints of her identity but she
still remains illusive.
7. Easter
A new beginning in the Grace of God. This collage exhibits the
exuberance of victory.
The joy of man and nature of the Lord's triumph over evil and death.
The printing technology of the fine art inkjet giclées brings out the
beauty and brilliance of her collages. The nature of a giclée print let
her collages jump out with deep blacks, saturation and gradations, hard
to achieve with other media.
Art of the Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and
Hip-art of the 1960s. It seems Christina's collages are also an
expression of Pop Art, Surrealism, Fashion-Fantasy or
Metaphoric-Fiction. Yet her works are in reality a re-assemblage of
deconstructed impressions of the 1960s. Her collages derived from
cutouts of magazine sheets, like Harpers Bazaar and Vogue, mirroring
the face of that magical period. Christina created this collection of
collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, feelings and impressions
of that time. Her work is timeless. And like a hidden treasure yet to
be fully discovered.
8. Creation
A new beginning in the Grace of God. This collage exhibits the
exuberance of victory.
The joy of man and nature of the Lord's triumph over evil and death.
The printing technology of the fine art ink jet giclées brings out the
beauty and brilliance of her collages. The nature of a giclée print let
her collages jump out with deep blacks, saturation and gradations, hard
to achieve with other media.
Art of the Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and
Hip-art of the 1960s. It seems Christina's collages are also an
expression of Pop Art, Surrealism, Fashion-Fantasy or
Metaphoric-Fiction. Yet her works are in reality a re-assemblage of
deconstructed impressions of the 1960s. Her collages derived from
cutouts of magazine sheets, like Harpers Bazaar and Vogue, mirroring
the face of that magical period. Christina created this collection of
collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, feelings and impressions
of that time. Her work is timeless. And like a hidden treasure yet to
be fully discovered.
9. Lord's Supper Table
The world of the unseen let's Christina sees Jesus surrounded
by worshipers in a swirl of ochre, browns, blues and whites. A winged
angel and others in ancient costumes compose a swirl of time and
progression of the essence and meaning of communion and fellowship. Not
religious but a vision of our relationship with the Lord.
While Christina loathes any social preoccupation with psychoanalysis,
her work is pure imagination drawn from her own pure psychic
automatism, by which she proposes to express the real functioning of
thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised
by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation. She
practices what the philosopher Husserl known as the father of
phenomenology of subjective experience as the source of all of our
knowledge of objective phenomena. Christina's Psychic Automatism is a
surrealist technique involving spontaneous assemblage without conscious
aesthetic or moral self-censorship. Automatism phenomena are perhaps
parallel to the non-idiomatic improvisation of free jazz.
Christina's Collage surrealism is based on the belief in the superior
reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the
omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to
ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself
for them in solving all the principal problems of life.
10. Maria
There is no doubt that this modern day icon represents a
female form another time and place. With her reverence of the mother of
Jesus she surrounds the hallowed face with soft pastel roses, and
winged birds, clouds and shy. This new vision of holiness is a
priceless collector's item, which can only be compared with the
medieval icons. This piece does not deny or embolden misinterpretation
but simply expresses the purity and peace of faith and hope.
Christina's mass image art combines eclectic mysticism, current
high-end fashion metaphors and values of her real and exaggerated
impression of the society values around her. With each completed piece
we see the combined segments of what man has made out of modern
reality. Each piece reifies the potential of the combination of the
segments to its aesthetic conclusion. As she breaks and reassembles
fragments of Plexiglas to form her sculptures so she cut apart the
fashion magazines of the early sixties and reassembled them to compose
their own personality. In style, many of her collages are absolutely
baroque and busting with dynamic life and exuberance.
11. Maya
To the Hindus Maya is The power of a god or demon to transform
a concept into an element of the sensible world. It is the transitory,
manifold appearance of the sensible world, which obscures the
undifferentiated spiritual reality from which it originates; the
illusory appearance of the sensible world. It is another term for the
Mayan culture and this collage places a blond female head on female
body surrounded by swirl of white and ochre fabrics.
Like all the pop artist of her time, Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg,
Liechtenstein, she delights in using and reusing the obvious in to the
new. This fact remains also true in her acrylic paintings. She is a
true maker of metaphors, making the strange familiar and communicating
one thing in terms of another. Formally trained also as a fashion
illustrator at the New York Art Students League she uses the figures,
costumes and textures to recreate styles and fashion looks of the dream
world. Each image is bizarre and somewhat extraterrestrial with the art
of a Spielberg or Jim Henderson's Muppets each becomes both the reality
of our world and some other.
12. Xanadu
Mongol city founded by Kublai Khan, 1625, Anglicized form of
Shang-tu. Sense of "dream place of magnificence and luxury" derives
from Coleridge's poem (1816). It is a place of great beauty, luxury,
and contentment. A Shangri-La expressed by this exuberant female in
swirl of fabrics above and below her upper and lower torso. Her eyes
only peek out from behind the swirl and dares us to enjoy the dance,
music and excitement of this instant caught by Christina.
While the techniques of collage were first used at the time of the
invention of paper in China around 200 BC the use of collage remained
very limited until the 10th century in Japan, when calligraphers began
to apply glued paper, using texts on surfaces, when writing their
poems. Her work cries out for words and music only to be found by the
viewer. In the 19th century, collage methods also were used among
hobbyists for memorabilia (i.e. applied to photo albums) and books
(i.e. Hans Christian Andersen, Carl Spitzweg).In this way Christina's
home is filled family photo collages. It is her natural way to express
her ideas and relationships of people, places and events. The term
collage derives from the French "colle" meaning, "glue". This term was
coined by both Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the beginning of the
20th century when collage became a distinctive part of modern art.
13. Sun-He
The Korean name conjures light and bursts with energy of
musical, acting and artistic talent. This collage is a sole figure of a
female wearing a bronze billowing skirt below a great yellow and yellow
ocher middle and above her bare waste a copper brown silk and leather
topping. Some say Zixiao (Sun-he) was formally Emperor Wen (of Eastern
Wu) was a son and one-time crown prince of Eastern Wu's founding
emperor Sun Quan during the Three Kingdoms period.
Art of the so-called Love Generation are Impressions of the
psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the sixties. Christina's Psychic
Automatism is graphic memoirs made during the sixties. While they seem
to be Pop Art, Surreal, Fantasy Metaphors they are really a
re-assemblage of deconstructed reality.
Christina's Giclées Collages combines the beauty and brilliance of this
printing technology. While photographic prints are somewhat dull and
limited a giclée print let her collages pop with deep blacks,
saturation and gradations hard to achieve with other media.
14. CoCo
Like Picasso Christina rearranges the human figure in this
surreal pink and rose colored burst of petals with her head set in a
lower ovary (ovule). Like its name sake for a tall palm tree bearing
coconuts as fruits; widely planted throughout the tropics these
blossoms are prolific and bountiful. It will be a treasure to its owner
to remind about the possibilities of life and creativity within each
person.
While Pop Art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as
opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy
elements of any given culture, Christina's work challenged this mundane
idea with her passion for harmony, grace and balance. She demonstrated
that the two could work together and that "deconstructivism"; Dada and
Surrealism could be made popular into the jargon of the reality of the
world of fashion and cosmopolitan urbanism.
15. Narcisse
The word is derived from a Greek myth. Narcissus was a
handsome Greek youth who rejected the desperate advances of the nymph
Echo. As punishment, he was doomed to fall in love with his own
reflection in a pool of water. Unable to consummate his love, Narcissus
pined away and changed into the flower that bears his name, the
narcissus.
Freud believed that some narcissism is an essential part of all of us
from birth.
Andrew Morrison claims that, in adults, a reasonable amount of healthy
narcissism allows the individual's perception of his needs to be
balanced in relation to others.
Some say Narcisse is about sex, religion, power and deceit. Red, gold,
purple swirls surround this female seemingly skipping though life.
While Christina loathes any social preoccupation with psychoanalysis,
her work is pure imagination drawn from her own pure psychic
automatism, by which she proposes to express the real functioning of
thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised
by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation. She
practices what the philosopher Husserl known as the father of
phenomenology of subjective experience as the source of all of our
knowledge of objective phenomena.
16. Salome
Persimmon, gold beige and black furs and adorned with pearls
and Arabic hangings is the laughing female face. The shapes and forms
are only fantasy shaped animal icons creating a new icon of the famed
seductress set on a purple background.
"As she broke the Plexiglas into fragments, she too tore the magazine's
pages. As she reassembled the Plexiglas fragments to a form a new
reality so she assembled the bits and pieces of magazine sheets to form
metaphors of spirit, fashion, urbanism, and a fantasy life and into a
visual memoir of the Love Generation".
Christina's pop art collages are now available as fine art ink jet
giclée printed reproductions as the entire collection of the originals
is being kept as part of the artist's estate. This is being done to
preserve their integrity and value of the their importance and value.
Each of the fine art giclées are individually signed and dated and be
part of any connoisseurs fine art collection. Each is truly one of
kind, unique and remarkable achievements. With the advent of digital
photography and the slow demise of mechanical lithography, digital ink
jet high-end printing is expanding exponentially. Giclée loosely means
spraying or squirting in French. Christina's collage giclées are
characteristics of a true digital art print.
17. Vampira
Vampira portrays that seductive woman who uses her sensuality
to exploit men. In red silk fur with rode lame she reclines open armed
and backward on a gigantic lipstick red divan.
Vampira's dark eyes and white skinned arm are all that shows covered by
the blood red power of red on a purple background. Christina's Pop Art
is part of one of the major art movements of the Twentieth Century.
Characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture,
such as advertising and comic books. Pop Art is widely interpreted as
either a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism
or an expansion upon them. Christina was the first artist to use
Plexiglas (acrylic). Her sculptures are amazing examples of three
dimensional abstract expressionism and movement in the transparency of
space. Christina studied sculpture under Peter Augustino at Columbia
University.
While Pop Art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as
opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy
elements of any given culture, Christina's work challenged this mundane
idea with her passion for harmony, grace and balance.
18. Turandot
Discovered in Heidelberg in 1904 by Max Wolf is a minor planet
orbiting the sun. Christina's cousin was an astronomer on the staff of
the Max Plank Institute in Heidelberg and as a German appreciates the
Turandot of German mythology and Turandot is an opera in three acts by
Giacomo Puccini, to an Italian libretto by Giuseppe Adami and Renato
Simoni, based on the play Turandot by Carlo Gozzi. Turandot is a
Persian word and name meaning "the daughter of Turan".
Turan being a region of Central Asia which used to be part of the
Persian Empire. In Persian, the fairy tale is known as "Turandokht",
with "dokht" being a contraction for "Dokhtar" (meaning "Daughter").
Indeed shows the daughter of Turan in great Russian furs.
The story of Turandot was taken from the Persian collection of stories
called The Book of One Thousand and One Nights or Hezar o-yek shab
(1722 French translation Les Mille et une Nuits by Francois Petis de la
Croix), where the character of "Turandokht" as a cold Chinese princess
was found. But this story about a Chinese princess bears much
resemblance to Persian poet Nizami's story about a Russian princess
being pursued by the Sassanid king Behram. The story of Turandokht is
one of the best known from de la Croix's translation. Christina cloaks
this African Queen in exotic mink, ermine, and fox in an icon of
nobility and stature. This vision was merely a precursor to the twenty
years she would later spend in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia where her
art was very well received in first of its kind one lady shows in the
desert capital city of Riyadh.
19. Mercedes
While Mercedes is a city in SW Uruguay, on the R�o Negro the
Infanta Maria de las Mercedes of Spain (1880–1904), Princess of the
Asturias, for all 24 years of her life the Heiress Presumptive of the
Spanish royal crown, and for a period in 1885–1886, the extant Head of
the State of Spain, was born as Do�a Mar�a de las Mercedes de Borb�n y
Habsburgo-Lorena, eldest daughter of King Alfonso XII of Spain (Don
Alfonso de Borb�n de C�diz y Borb�n de Espa�a).
Christina engulfs the slender royal in baby blue ostrich feather, silks
and vertical high reaching blue timed domed minerate. This vertical
axis grisaille is contrast on a stark black background metaphorically
linking the royal lady with her dreamy castle and royal structures.
20. Luna
The black background sets off the blues and lavender shapes
and forms which seems to be a female in flight and the moons way of
making shadows in the sky. Part of the abstracted spot design is parts
of the moon hovering over the lower blue forms in moon's shadows.
Christina's mass image art combines eclectic mysticism, current
high-end fashion metaphors and values of her real and exaggerated
impression of the society values around her. With each completed piece
we see the combined segments of what man has made out of modern
reality. Each piece reifies the potential of the combination of the
segments to its aesthetic conclusion. As she breaks and reassembles
fragments of Plexiglas to form her sculptures so she cut apart the
fashion magazines of the early sixties and reassembled them to compose
their own personality. In style, many of her collages are absolutely
baroque and busting with dynamic life and exuberance. Her work is in
the genre of other pop artist such as English pop artist Sir Peter
Thomas Blake and Richard Hamilton; as well as Norwegian artist, Hariton
Pushwagner. The tactility and appeal of each of her pieces is
irresistible as the origins of each segment. She has made of each much
more than they were in their original form and, have immortalized what
was once discarded and swept away with time.
21. Gemini
Gemini is a harlequin of double personality and image this two
female figured icon wrapped in pink, persimmon, ocher, gold, red and
black furs and plush fabric.
The face look at you and away from each other reifying Christina's
understanding of the Gemini star sign. Gemini is the third sign of the
zodiac in astrology. Also called Twins. They are together and share the
colors and luxury of a common context.
Like all the pop artist of her time, Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg,
Liechtenstein, she delights in using and reusing the obvious in to the
new. This fact remains also true in her acrylic paintings. She is a
true maker of metaphors, making the strange familiar and communicating
one thing in terms of another. Formally trained also as a fashion
illustrator at the New York Art Students League she uses the figures,
costumes and textures to recreate styles and fashion looks of the dream
world. Each image is bizarre and somewhat extraterrestrial with the art
of a Spielberg or Jim Henderson's Muppets each becomes both the reality
of our world and some other.
Christina's work speaks across centuries, cultures and genres.
To own her work is to posses a still life of importance and value.
For more of her work and background see her website: www.bariefez-barringten.com.
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