www.bariefez-barringten.com
LEGEND”
A graphic tale of the love generation’s hippie’s sixties started at
Haight Ashbury, San Francisco
Book of Christina’s Automatic Surrealist Collages
Made in Puerto Rico in 1968 from fashion magazines she collected in Manhattan and New Haven from 1966
By Christina and Barie Fez-Barringten
Artwork by Christina with Barie’s narrative
TOC
A. Preface
B. Introduction
C. Artist’s background
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 value of the their importance and value. Each of the fine art giclees 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 inkjet high-end printing is expanding exponentially. Giclée loosely means spraying or squirting in French. Christina’s collage giclees are characteristics 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, 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. 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 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.
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. The streets of New Haven were charged with “blacks” rioting against the “establishment”. Christina dressed in the her own designed and high fashion minis and soaked in the psychedelic sounds of the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Bee Gees, 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 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 the 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 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”, only to mention a few. Its neighboring small town is Dessau, the seat of the Bauhaus. Christina grew up in an atmosphere of great music and art. She draws upon that culture and sensitivities of grace and tenacity of that time which is little 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 into 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 foundation 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 there 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.
Like all the pop artist of her time, Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg, and Liechtenstein, Christina delights in using and reusing and converting the obvious into 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 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 also true in Christina’s dynamic acrylic paintings, and in her first of its kind acrylic sculptures. Rather than selling he originals Christina offers her collages as giclees. 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 jet 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.
Paul Rudolph's
Sarasota High school
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 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. The Frank Lawrence Gallery at East 57 Street and Park Ave. 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. 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 to know 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 the devastating loss, Christina turned to her art more than ever. She now studied sculpture at Columbia University under Professor Peter Augustini. In that period Christina learned to know 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. 1967 Barie originated 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 appointment 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 in to a large loft on East 68 Street. Barie taught architecture at 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 21).
In addition, Barie founded a New York not-for-profit corporation: "Laboratories for Metaphoric Environments". With one of its goals to provide under privileged children a glimpse of the creative excitement of the building industry. From cabinet work , to carpentry and design. There in order to illustrate his teaching he produced a series of words-drawings. 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. And, in addition he designed homes for a development in Belmopan, Belize, British Honduras.
Also, 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. Because of that the couple had moved to Houston. Also, Barie, always interested to inspire 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-Barringten's 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 can not be portrayed through art. 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. 1999 the Fez Barringtens 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 posses 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 in the 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 collectors 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 there 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 Shangrila 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 with in 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 giclees 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 giclees 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 Río 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 Doña María de las Mercedes de Borbón y Habsburgo-Lorena, eldest daughter of King Alfonso XII of Spain (Don Alfonso de Borbón de Cádiz y Borbón de España).
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 there 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
collage,,,love generation,,Surrealist,psychedelic,,eclectic mysticism,Raushneberg,Metaphoric,Harper's Bazaar,Vogue,kiss,Automatism,
