| SONJA KOBREHEL |
| PAINTINGS & DRAWINGS |
| CONVERSATIONS WITH CREATIVE PEOPLE: EIDETIC ICONOGRAPHY? By ROD DROWN ;...Vancouver is like a modern day Constantinople.Culture abounds!One of the great pleasures I have enjoyed over the past few months has been to explore the work of three, relatively unknown artists... ...One of them,Sonja Kobrehel ,is of German-Hungarian descent.Her work,a fascinating personal iconographic expressionism with echoes of Old Egyptian and a tangled mix of Balkan religious symbolism,has been displayed in shows and galleries in Spain,Poland,Hungary and Yugoslavia to positive response from critic and public alike.She has also exhibited in Japan ,Canada and,most recently,in USA.Her paintings,collages and prints are in high demand in Europe... ...Since her mid-20's she has worked constantly on her art.The Mediterranean and Adriatic atmosphere that pervades her work (i.e. the bright colours,the sunlit walls)comes from the summers she spent on the French and Yugoslav coasts... |
| ...Her techniques -drawing,acrylic,and oil on canvas,mixed media,collage and pastel-were refined at the Academy of Art in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia during the early 1990's... ...Kobrehel's symbols within her works often reflect personal aspects and her national heritage.Sometimes ,as she mentioned during an interview,her symbols have served as problem-solving devices... ...Kobrehels iconography is intriguing.Her large canvases contain a mixture of small,weird faces and symbols,and odd figures that resemble the bizarre offspring of animals and insects.And ,often,everything in her paintings occurs against a background of eidetic imagery.It is as if she has cultivated the talent of closing her eyes and,then with tremendous powers of recall,putting to canvas what lies beneath and within the skin of her eyes... |
| ...her creations,a mixture of daily occurrences from the floating personal present and of endless time's archetypal and arcane symbols.In studying the evolution of such works,one surmises that Kobrehel's interior perceptions and attitdes have likewise evolved... ...Many of these creations form a series of works in which the symbols in each undergo subtle transitions in colour,shape and form.For example,in a group of about a dozen similar paintings,each based on underlying six-frame calendar motif,the contents of each frame evolve subtly.However,rather than numbers,each daily division of the "calendar"has unique combinations of figures,forms and squiggles that are religious,astrological and vaguely Picasso-like... ...As an artist,Sonja says that she thinks first of colours,then of symbols.When she has found the right colour,her heart is satisfied and the symbols perhaps can be seen to be correspondent to the states of being she finds herself in.Purple and its close relative,...traditionally represents the meeting and blending of the mind and spirit... |
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