The Artist at her exhibition at Vassar College
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Ilse Schreiber-Noll is an artist of the multimedia realm, exquisitely capturing pivotal facets of political and environmental concerns within the landscape of her paintings, Artist Books, installations, and prints. Of German origin, she traversed across the Atlantic to the United States and attained her Master of Fine Arts from Purchase College, SUNY, where she both studied under and instructed alongside the esteemed Uruguayan-American artist, Antonio Frasconi. The brilliant insights of Donald Kuspit resonate profoundly as he skillfully unravels the quintessence of certain elements depicted within her artistic oeuvre. In his eloquent words, Kuspit proclaims, shadowy presences, abstract remnants of a ruined nature. "A Sturm and Drang expressionist, as the painting The Storm makes clear, Schreiber-Noll seems to show nature in its death throes, agonized beyond recovery. She says that her trees are “symbols of hope, new beginnings, regeneration and the promise of protecting our forests for the next generations,” but her forest is very black, her trees are charred fragments of nature. There is no sanctuary in them, only suffering. “Save the Dream/Save the Planet,” the elaborate text that accompanies her trees declares, but it is only a dream, never to become a reality, as the nightmarish trees suggest. I see angry futility in Schreiber-Noll’s works, which seems an appropriate response to the neglect of nature, even indifference to its plight, and unawareness of the fact that its death is ours." |