Lucie Schauer Elementarzeichen

Aufbruch in die Vergangenheit - Rückkehr in die Zukunft

Thrust Into the Past – Return to the Future

FRANEK has discovered a world of the past, several worlds of the past on her many trips to non-European countries. Her preoccupation with prehistoric signs, not unlike the artist Rune Mields, is shaped by a scientific curiosity, coupled with artistic sensitivity. Comparative research characterised her early work which explored ancient images and signs from cultures of the Near East, Central America and Scandinavia, gleaned from books and in libraries. For many years now, FRANEK has travelled to the sites herself, returning with rock carving rubbings, including records of ancient Mayan scripts, videos about the Nazca culture’s signs, notes on life in indigenous reservations, and frottages from the Canary Islands and Israel's mountains. Last year, on behalf of a scholarship in Bleckede, Lower Saxony, Franek-Koch worked with transcripts of hallucinatory stories about werewolves and bird flight, a boat trip and the tree of life, a hut, a stairway to heaven, a human silhouette and carcass. As a result, she produced works that are partly magical chiaroscuro of black forms in grisaille, and partly full of the primary colours; red, blue and yellow, on a brownish-reddish background like a forest fire and blood sacrifice. Heinz Thiel called these large-format works by FRANEK "conceptual notations".

Lucie Schauer in: „Elementarzeichen - Urformen visueller Information“, Katalog zur Ausstellung in der Staatlichen Kunsthalle Berlin, 1985

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