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The Week in Germany: Culture November 3, 2006 Manhattan Transfer: American Explores Grief, German Jazzes Things Up
Two very different art exhibitions with a German connection are now on show in New York: Alan Magee's "Trauerarbeit" and Lisa Lyskava's "Jazzing up". Magee, born in Pennsylvania in 1947, has been struck by Germans coming to terms with a dark past. His series of monotype faces and its collective title, Trauerarbeit (Labor of Mourning), were partly inspired by the conscious use of that term by Germany's postwar generation. An exhibition of these works opened on Wednesday at the Goethe Institut in New York and runs through December 15. "Magee understood, from learning about that particular German experience, that we Americans need an equivalent word like Trauerarbeit and an equivalent concept to help us to know our own history," the Goethe Institut states on its website. "According to Magee, we seem to live in a sustained and voluntary blindness to the harm we've done, and that we continue to do. So, German history has helped him to better understand American society, and its current reticence in speaking out against even the most grievous wrongs," it adds. "Trauerarbeit" has been mounted at the Goethe Institut in collaboration with Friends of Freie Univeristät Berlin and Spectrum Concerts Berlin.
Sizzling, visceral, visual jazz At the same time, works by German artist Lisa Lyskava, who was born in 1949 in the western German city of Münster and now divides her time between Bochum and New York, are on show at the National Arts Club at 15 Gramercy Park South in New York. It opened on October 30 and continues through November 13.
From an early age, musical activities (piano and percussion) helped mold her artistic creativity. In New York, intense encounters with jazz, as well as interaction with jazz musicians have been a permanent inspiration for her painting. Lyskava has also worked in theater and film, launching her career as a professional artist in 1986. Her paintings are found in numerous private and company collections, including Aral, Deutsche Bank and Telecom.
J. Sanders Eaton, writing in 2000 in New York for "Gallery &
Studio", defined her "sizzling, visceral, visual jazz"
as follows: "… her virtual visual musicianship … the exquisite
tension between the material and the ethereral … Lisa Lyskava is
an adventurous experimenter whose risk-taking often results in intuitive
discoveries that can be startlingly beautiful."
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