Elisabeth Büchel

Elisabeth Büchel has devoted her artistic work completely to painting and its specific devices. “lines. areas. colours – the thing itself” was the programmatic title of a gallery exhibition in Vienna in 2002 with which the artist concluded a three-month studio stay as artist in residence. Areas, colours and brush structures are also fundamental to the fifteen sheets that make up the Folded series. In this case, however, the line – the basic element of all things graphical which Büchel translated into the realm of painting – is the result of folding. By means of repeated folding, she structured a surface, with variations in the folding process creating different visual orders inscribed into the support. This also leads to links between the various sheets, for example when one folding pattern is axis- or point-symmetrical to another. The horizontal and vertical fold lines make up areas whose geometric accuracy of shape contrasts with the possibilities acted out in the application of colour: individual rectangles are incompletely filled with colour or their boundary lines are overpainted; in some cases, areas of opaque rich colours stand out markedly from the ground in delicate blue, red and green; in others, figure and ground are indistinguishable. The fifteen-part paper work was created in 2004 for an exhibition at the gallery of the University of Tulsa School of Art, at which the artist exhibited acrylic and oil paintings, but also installations consisting of material available on site. It was at this university in Tulsa (Oklahoma) and in Bridgeport (Connecticut) that Elisabeth Büchel studied art from 1979 to 1982, having worked previously as a nursery-school teacher in Liechtenstein and Switzerland. After returning from the US, she resumed her profession before deciding to devote herself fully to visual arts. For years she was also involved in the Liechtenstein art scene, for example at the “Schichtwechsel” art association or in establishing the Liechtenstein Art School. An initial retrospective was dedicated to the artist, who died young, at the Gasometer in Triesen in 2011. Franziska Hilbe