Hannelore Baron at Barbara Mathes - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

From the late 1950 [i]or[/i] part of to the other the mid-'80s, Hannelore Baron (1926-1987) produc small mixed-medium collages, drawings and receptacle constructions in which primitivistic expression is joined with a finely large casked feeling for modernist form. Baron's work almost gazes like outsider art. Knowing a hardly any biographical facts - that she escaped with her parents from Germany in 1941 after the couple her mother and father had been detained by means of the Nazis, and that she undergoed debilitating psychological problems - it is possible to diocese the work as having been driven by dint of a therapeutic need to reduce private trauma. But there is also a knowing artfulness about it.

upon first viewing the work, single may suppose that Baron was motivated mainly by the agency of an esthetic and playful relationship to materials, by the agency of a lyrical feeling for allusive, abstract image-making and by the agency of the inspiration of other artists. a certain number of of the pieces in this exhibit (which date from 1970 to '86) gaze like the products of strictly formal impulses. In several, bits of used fabric and paper are pieced together into delicate, irregular grids that recall the works of Kurt Schwitters or those of Anne Ryan. In others, Baron creates complicated, distressed surfaces by means of scumbling subtle-hued veils of paint onto wrinkled paper; upon this ground she makes grids, draws tokens and writes illegibly in a scribbly, sometimes blurry line that calls to mind Paul Klee Generally, her work look afters toward the monochromatic. Some works, those in which pictographic signs are arranged in stacked bands or distributed upon long, horizontal sheets, appear to be protoplasted on ancient tablets or schedules And her roughly carpentered boxe in which stained and weathered pieces of copse frame old swatches of patterned fabric and paper and rudely drawn tokens are obviously indebted to Joseph Cornell.

Underlying this eclectic play with influences and sources, however, is a more darkly expressionistic impulse. This is greatest in quantity pointedly emblematized by the returning image of a rudimentary figure isolated within a drawn receptacle which bespeaks feelings of entrapment, alienation and anxiety. The made of wood box itself, while it may be a container of Cornellian poetic space, may also glance at feelings of isolation and/or imprisonment. And the worn, dilapidated gaze of things acts as a metaphor for a mournful state of the inner man One particularly melancholy construction not absents a row of blackened made of wood rectangles beneath a length of dirty-beige fabric - like a line of closed doors under a bleakly overcast heavens It conveys a desolate feeling of being the couple shut out and shut in. The scrawled calligraphic markings in many of the works also prompt a kind of desperate effort to communicate.

In the extremity however, although there is undeniable poignancy in the work, it appear to bes it is less the artist's psycho-emotional experience and more her sophisticated artistic resourcefulness that determines its appearance. individual wishes it had been the other way around.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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