“As I belong to the American post-war generation it was natural for me to begin with abstract expressionism. I then moved to representational figures within an abstract setting, documenting an unconscious thought-process, an automatism.”
Barbara Weil
Barbara Weil (Chicago, 1933 – Andratx, 2018)
Was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. She graduated from Roosevelt University and attended the Art Institute of Chicago. While raising a family she also lived and worked in Southern California, later moving permanently to Mallorca, in 1972. This marked a period of major development in her painting and sculptural techniques.
Weil was a highly intuitive artist, largely self taught with the exception of night classes in drawing and painting at the Art Institute of Chicago while in her early twenties, just having started a family. Her mentor was the artist Douglass Craft, a professor at the Institute, who she forever credited with having recognised her ability, and who guided her towards expressionism.
Following the architectonic forms found in her paintings, she embarked on a series of fiberglass sculptures. Weil explains these sculptures as “a feeling of a joyful ironic bliss.” Weil explored the occult philosophy and employed the circle as a basis for her forms with the intention of creating an intense universal emotion through this domain.
The large paintings that followed were strong in psychological primary colours with achromatic black and white. The mystical and spiritual self of the creative artist is expressed by different materials such as wood, paper, fiberglass, auto-lacquer, carbon, pastel and chalk. These works have been transformed into a diverse movement of beauty. Originally inspired by the Arte Povera movement, during the 70’s she discovered cardboard as a material for creating abstract sculptural forms.
After experimentation with resins and different combinations of fibre glass strands applied to the cardboard shapes, she developed sculptures over a period of years, one of which was The Critical Change. Two decades later when working with Libeskind and his associates this design became the basis for a monumental joint project which was never realised, but was noted for its audacity and conceptual innovativeness as an abstract architectural installation 16 meters in height.
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 was the inspiration for Libeskind’s design. Having exhibited her work in Paris, Madrid, Barcelona and Berlin, Weil has established herself as an International figure with collectors travelling to her studio from China, Japan and India. Visitors to Studio Weil will witness a profound symbiosis between Weil’s art and Libeskind’s Architecture.
