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Kim Lieberman: Human Currents

Opening Thursday 5 October 2006 at 18h00
Exhibition catalogue available
44 Stanley Avenue  Braamfontein Werf (Milpark)  Johannesburg
+27 11 726-2234

the release:

The substratum for Kim Lieberman’s latest work is a blank, white puzzle, with no printed image on it. It is akin to Kasimir Malevich’s white painted square on a white canvas. To scramble the puzzle piece would be easy, but to put it together again, virtually impossible without some visual clue. The only pointer is the regularity of the way the pieces fit together, created when the puzzle was first marked by a standard puzzle cutter. These white puzzles can also be likened to Lieberman’s previous use of blank, perforated sheets of paper on which postage stamps are printed. Both white puzzle and blank postage stamp sheets are empty, yet connected, and consequently, ‘whole’ and ‘complete’, by a series of perfectly interlocking pieces or perforations.

These two strata form a conceptual framework, a ‘trellis for other media’, in Lieberman’s own words, ‘to hang, climb and intertwine on’. In the case of her earlier blank stamp sheets, Lieberman embroidered each rectangular piece, using the perforations as convenient holes to thread through the silk yarn while creating in the subtle and sophisticated hues and delicate textures, among other things, a virtual abstract landscape. In her next phase, Lieberman peopled her blank postage sheets with silhouetted figures, at times referencing family, friends and/or famous people, or sometimes the silhouettes are chance images of people she saw in National Geographic magazines.

In her latest work Lieberman is again concerned with the conceptual connectedness presupposed by the grid, albeit the blank postage stamp sheet, or the complete white puzzle. The sense of connectedness is reinforced by an intricate arabesque line that literally forms a wavy current that links all the important elements in the picture plane together in a completed whole. When talking about the origin of the arabesque line, Lieberman references motifs she first encountered in kitchen and bathroom tiles in condemned downtown Johannesburg buildings, due for implosion; she also refers to her studies of William Morris textile and wallpaper designs that sparked her interest in the organic, yet ordered line and mentions the delicate, curving engraving on the silver helmet of a Medieval suit of armor she has seen in a museum.

In some of  Kim Lieberman’s work, the arabesque line is very strong, conjoining all the seemingly disparate images of silhouetted figures in the picture plane, making currents, making waves, just like human beings do when they interact and connect with one another. ‘I am not only interested in the current, or ripple’ she says, ‘but in the human, humane element that comes with it’. In other works the ‘current’ is less obvious and explicit. It is also suggested by a flight of butterflies across the white puzzle. Currents or ‘clouds’ of tiny white butterflies are sometimes spotted fluttering diagonally across Johannesburg in a northeasterly direction. The butterfly has become a prominent image in Lieberman’s work because of its delicate, yet powerful, nature. Lieberman quotes the scientist Edward Lorenz theorizing as early as 1963 that “a butterfly’s wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that ultimately cause a tornado to appear”. For her the flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which could cause a chain of events leading to large-scale phenomena. Had a butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different. Her butterflies thus symbolize the influence of one on another.

Another way in which Lieberman suggests interconnectedness in her work is to fuse, or graft two puzzles into two different images. For example, she would paint a figure in red against a white background on the one empty puzzle, and the reverse on a second puzzle; the same figure, but in white, against a red background. She would then exchange every second piece of the two puzzles with each other, creating two new ‘woven’ works out of the exchange. The ritualized process of puzzle piece exchanging becomes a metaphor for human interaction. It echoes Lieberman’s previous work she created through a laborious stitching process in her stamp sheets. Once this powerful metaphor has lodged itself in the mind of the viewer, Lieberman then pushes the boundaries even farther but pulling out every sixth puzzle piece and assembling them in another grid, called Six Degrees of Separation, and symbolizing what she calls the fact, (or is it coincidence?) that everybody is connected to each other in some way or another by tracing the connection no farther back than six steps, degrees or levels.

Kim Lieberman lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds an MA (Fine Arts Degree) from the Witwatersrand University (2001). She has had solo exhibitions at Esso Gallery, New York City, NY (2004), the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2003), Camouflage Art Culture Politics, Johannesburg (2000), the Mark Coetzee Fine Art Cabinet, Cape Town, South Africa (1997), the Civic Gallery, Johannesburg (1995) and has been included in numerous group exhibitions internationally. Four catalogues / monographs have been published on her work and her exhibitions have been widely reviewed.