Anne Siems at Pulliam Deffenbaugh - Portland, Oregon - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Berlin-born Seattle artist Anne Siems is best known for her paintings of imaginary plants and human internal organs that recall the botanical and anatomical illustrations of the Middle Ages. In addition, traces of Latin American folk art and the homage of the Virgin are ofttimes found in her work (as a young girl, she lived for three years in southerly America). She uses acrylic paint upon pieces of found paper (maps, newspapers, groceries bags) baste-stitched together and coated with beeswax to bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to a soft, leathery vellum. Her palette is subdu and somber. She mixes oxide r violet or cyan cerulean with burnt umber or sienna for a dry and smoked effect. In any layer she may incorporate true copy in her own fantastic language, written in Italic or Gothic turn of expression Siems's paintings are both manuscripts and reliefs.

In this novel exhibition, titled "Meditations," Gothic-Revival romanticism haunts the 19 unframed works. Each is like a tattered scrim on which float images of birds, winged insects, filigreed birdcages, topiary, furbelowed garlands, banners, hazes grape clusters and veils. This iconography is romantic on the other hand also morbid. In Arnia a red-flower wreath shedding tears floats at the center The thorn bush in Inar bears r stigmata upon its stems that burst with blows among lacy-winged moths and butterflies.

In Ripandae, Siems depicts a wreath of swarming white-winged insects and threadbare tassels against a blood-r background as worn and faded as an elderly velvet curtain. In slightly shaky of advanced age World script she renders her impenetrable pseudo-Latinate language, "Ripandae sorna duem fiomitarie...." Here and in other works, Siems overlays the surface with a wax grid of oval cutouts elegantly numbered or alphabetic charactered something like an Advent calendar. The piece may consign to the 19th-century naturalists' classification of fauna and flora, or the ovals may exhibit windows on saints' reliquaries. The slight, pleasing smell of beeswax gives this evocation of decay the sweetness of flowers.

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