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"From the remains to diversity"
Six sculptures by Luba Lisenberg

Luba Lisenberg has performed a persistent and systematic work in the field of sculpture. Her works on iron and wood are well known achieving a profile of her own in the area of spatial arts. 
In this occasion her work on wood is oriented towards an "a priori" idea: the rescue. Her wish is to rescue the remains of fallen, abandoned trees and bring them back to life through laborious and creative work.
Using original techniques, the artist deals with these noble materials that constitute the structural basis of her sculptures. We can visualize a constant shape expressed in a spiral line, like rising flames with an ascending rhythm.
Poplar, ash tree, radal and tipa are the trees chosen to modify the sensation of abandonment and death. By means of a chisel and other tools ad-hoc, she has built six sculptures that make up this selection.
The attitude of restoring wood is a behaviour that relates nature through art yielding life to a remain. There is no doubt that every human action has its own meaning, some men destroy, others build and some others rebuild.
In this respect, artists are always present working for the conversion of these materials that become truthful creative pieces of art conferring multiple meanings to them.


Rosa Faccaro - Argentine Association of Art Critics-International Association of Art Critics

 

Luba Lisenberg and the woods that sing works and dreams

In the Museum “Beato Angélico” of our city the artist Luba Lisenberg displays works on wood in the exhibition “From the Rest to Diversity”, that is, for sure, a lesson of works and dreams.
Her output lifts up the chant of the matter to heaven. One of her works rests near the level of the floor, like emerging from the earth that feed the original roots. The others elate seeking in a gesture to the future, as every genuine piece of art does. And there dawns what it germinated in the deep vertex of hope sustained by the patient search of the artist. And her heartbeat, her warmth, her own life.
Lisenberg inclines to the sacred imprint and follows, by metals and hand, the final goal, the enigma of the polished surface that modulates the primary root from the arcanums of the earth. Luba Lisenberg has celebrated the rite and its ancient mystery.

Jorge Héctor Paladini
La Plata, Buenos Aires Province , Argentina (August 13, 2004)

 

 

Dear Luba, At first the image I have of your work has to do with an important assesment of you as a maker. Not many artists produce as much as you do. You adjust very well to Picasso´s 
direction: 90 % transpiration and 10% inspiration. This is very important for an artist. The other thing I want to point out as the most remarkable one, has to do with your ability to give life to wood, not imposing your imprint but building it in dialogue with the material. You work very skilfully on metals but I think your empathy is fundamentally with wood.
The thematic of your sculptures is very good. The one I like best is Noah´s Arch because of its historical implications. The perception I had of the room was that of a forest with living characters in it. It´s a view from a north European, a celtic one ; it gives mystic to your work. This is what I think of your sculptures. I deeply admire you for your production.


Daniel Sanchez
Board of Directors in V Board of Directors in Visual Arts
Cultural Institute of the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. MBAB Exhibition, 2004.

 

Luba Lisenberg's works are the result of a life experience that reveals its coherent language by allowing materials to speak for themselves, liberating their sensible qualities and ancestral registers. A careful selection of the expressive possibilities of wood pieces - found/recycled - gives them entry to the workshop. Once there, the forms appear without previous sketching, but through the cutting and splicing in the constructive solution of the visible assemblage. Straight resolves and sinuousities, flattened surfaces and voids surrounded by textures, curves, and contra-curves are some of the elements of the visual language with which the artist builds her vision of the cosmos. 
In Ariadna, an insistent incursion, a deepening that responds to the call if its own internal nucleus, reveals the labyrinth represented by a cavern and as such is the meeting place for the principles of life and death. Ariadna appears as help in the labyrinth of truth and as the labyrinth itself.
Múltiplo, Germinal, D- vorador Uno y Dos also obey to binary uses, exposing a natural tendency for gathering meaning. The Minotauro, murky dweller, looses drama in light of the idea, allowing the cognizance of a less threatening, and certainly highly enigmatic subtler message. The energy of the sacred reveals itself in the very particular and elaborated biblical allusion of the sculptural group, Arcano- e.
Luba Lisenberg instills her work with the will to save reality of its own senselessness, bestowing a symbolic articulation, conceiving man as a mythopoetic animal.

M.V.Rubellio (British Arts Centre, 2002) 

 

Lately apart from changing to big formats getting the volume to play with human scale- she made her works take straight roads allowing bigger space for the spectator's reading. The big volumes of different kinds of wood respecting the material's accidents and marks have a poetic presence parting from neat shapes."

Fabián Lebenglik, Página 12, Buenos Aires, 9/97

 

"If Malena sings the tango as nobody else, argentine sculptor Luba Lisenberg desintegrates it to remake it in wood and junk with a precision that makes one doubt if a work like this would be feasible outside Rio de la Plata."


Macarena Langbleib, El Observador, Montevideo - Uruguay, 7/96

"Interesting elaborated sculptured pieces, the most interesting part of wich is seeing the depth of the execution performed at the plastic level that an exhibition requieres." 

Rosa Faccaro - 9/94

 

Luba Lisenberg, as Henry Moore, in some of her works of her 2001 series finds a sculpture following the vein of the wood, process in which the suggestion of the material dominates the improvisation , this one understood as the automatic and inconcient language of the surrealism. The selection of different woods and the sensitivity in the execution, with the manifest tracks of the tool on the surface, revalue the work (not the trade) in the sculpture. In others, like in Arcano-e, a two-way structure - horizontal and vertical- crowned by a series of forms, I would say free ones, avoid the geometric as well as the organic definitions.
Here is present her interest by the construction and its particular composition based on heaping up elements, as some previous works show. They are indicators of the encounter of a language of primary relations or, may be, the attempt of a new possible language. Series 2001 of Luba Lisenberg. is a good example of the protagonism of the form.


Carlos Boccardo -April 2001 (from the brochure of the solo exhibition in the Museum of Fine Arts. La Plata. Buenos Aires Province.

 

 

The ancient dreams of ancestral wood

..."Access to the work of Luba Lisenberg is not immediate. However, it does attract quickly, in the admirable realization of each piece, but it demands the quota of silent dialogue that defines any accomplished work".

Jorge H. Paladini, Nueva Avenida,7/99

 

Exhibition at La Plata´s Cathedral ​Museum. La Plata City

..."With unique skill and techniques, Lisenberg lovingly works different woods. She names the exhibition "Letters" but we need to recall forgotten idioms that still pulsate in the caves, tombs or vases with their enigmas.
...Lisenberg rises her marvelous work from those ancient roots and her woods express that warmly.
"The ancient sign, the communion of the surface with the air around it, the deftly worked hollows and the spaces that leaving the original form get together for ever in each piece to attain the sought melody, prove it with lyrical charm".

Jorge H. Paladini, Pregón, 6/97

 

"Luba Lisenberg's works point out more and more a reappraisal of rupture where unit is questioned and an extense variety of posibilities of expression opens before our eyes. Objects found and her particular way " of articulating them build up a discontinuous fragmentary language that seem to be her present concern."

Carlos Boccardo - 9/94

 

…."In a time in which all is confusion, where the true values to be rescued are not clear, where questioning is a search for identity from the origins, Luba Lisenberg joins the extreme spontaneity of the creative act with subjacent analytical power in the harsh self-critic to which she submits herself. And in this creative act is where she affirms herself to overcome the surrounding reality, to found her signifying code and thus reach in each of her works her own identity, spiritual and sensible."

Julián Agosta, Villa Bosch, , 6/94


 

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