SIBYLLE SZAGGARS
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
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Sibylle Szaggars was born in 1957 in Hamburg, Germany. Painting and sketching came to her naturally as a child. As a teenager she traveled extensively with her family throughout Europe, Morocco and Malaysia. She already then started to admire the depth and mystery of older cultures and traditions and would record her experiences through painting and sketching. Szaggars was drawn to post-impressionists such as Gauguin and Van Gogh and she studied their work and techniques. She moved to London, England, in the early 80's and fell in love with the Tate Gallery and The Academy of Art, where she was introduced to the works of Turner, and also to many modern and abstract artists. She spent many afternoons in those galleries to observe and study different techniques. In the mid 80's she rented her first painting studio under the roof of a working warehouse in the lower east end of London. The space was shared with many other artists which added some influence to her work. She started exhibiting her work in group showings in Germany and London. Eventually her travels would bring her to the USA in the late 80's. Her continued interest in old cultures and traditions would lead her to the mysteries of Native American culture. She found especial power and magnificence in the arid mesas of Arizona and the Hopi traditions. In residence on the mesas for some time, she learned about the Native Americans' spiritual connections to life, the land and the world, and was deeply touched by it. The result of this experience was a large series of paintings which were marked with a spiritual resonance. Szaggars moved to Utah full time in the early 90's where she set up her painting studio in the mountain village of Sundance. Szaggars' developing concerns for the future‹about the natural order of things‹continued. She became active within her work to warn of the impending dangers of extinction. Between 1994 and 1996, she created a number of large canvases which are painted statements about our vanishing wilderness. That work not only represented her commitment to protecting the environment but spoke of the camouflaged danger of denial. In the year 2000, Szaggars returned to Morocco where she visited some ancient towns and villages along the Draa Valley towards the Sahara Desert. There she was inspired by the almost silent beauty of women, men and landscape, the calm sensuality and almost sumptuous dignity of the human presence set against an ancient time of history and tradition. Her 2001 San Francisco exhibition of painted oil sketches and photographs influenced by Morocco opened just after 9/11. The incident of 9/11 was shocking and confusing to Szaggars and during 2002 and 2003, she created a new series of lushly painted oil studies of flowers and vases. A flower in a vase became an act of peace and poetry in a time of bombardment. Vases and vessels hold the living. But even that which holds is fragile. And it is a timely reminder that suggests the precariousness of containment. In 2004, she started a new series of large painted abstracts focusing on freely floating objects. In this series called "Wondrous Possibilities," Sibylle Szaggars explores a different thought‹freedom from containment that reaches into the wonder of undefined space, shape and color, where freedom from containment suggests possibilities, whether cosmic or cellular. Szaggars has exhibited internationally in Germany, England, the USA, Peru and Japan. She is also represented by the Ernesto Mayans Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Joyce Gordon Gallery in Oakland, California, and Linda Fairchild Contemporary Art, San Francisco, California. |