Emma Stibbon: StadtLandschaften / City Landscapes
- Artist: Emma Stibbon
- Published: 2009
- Publisher: Kerber, Berlin
- Edition: First
- Format: Hardback
- Height: 24cm.
- Pages: 80 pages
- Illustrations: 55 colour illustrations
£20.00£9.95
Add to basketEmma Stibbon: StadtLandschaften / City Landscapes
The powerful graphite and pastel drawings, and woodcuts by the British artist Emma Stibbon traverse inner-city topographies as well as topographies that are remote and largely untouched by human hands. In this Berlin cycle, the artist investigates the utopian dimension of Modernist avant-garde buildings and totalitarian architectural experiments in the German capital, a metropolis that is defined by its history like no other, by the discontinuity of becoming and falling away. Relics of constructions from the time of the German Emperor, the Weimar Republic, Nazism and the post-war period: the two divergent halves of the city blend into the functional market economy architecture of the contemporary capital. Through these works, Stibbon portrays this urban space as a reflection of the past and a place where the future can be projected.
Artists Biography
Emma Stibbon’s work is a response to landscapes as sites of psychological imaginings and visual phenomena. Through force of nature such as geologically changing or glacially eroded landscape, her interest lies in how apparent permanence can be so fragile.
In 2007 Emma set out to document the remains of summer Alpine glaciers in an extensive study. For her new body of work showing at R O O M, Emma has skilfully and delicately translated the unbelievable gifts this extreme environment has to offer into a series of finely made drawings in white chalk and graphite on blackboard and black prepared paper and through a small animated film.
In stark monochrome relief, Emma Stibbon raises ice fields up from snow covered valleys: casts views from above expressing impressive height and breadth and exposes the finiteness of this frail place appearing as a melancholy emptiness. Its fate is quietly obvious.
