DOROTHEA VON ELBE

An Obsessive Way to Assemble a Forest

Trees provide us with shade, food, shelter and water; everything we need to survive and to make our cities livable. They are always present in our lives and in our memory. Trees can sometimes be arrogant and haughty, or humble and reserved. The hackberry, accomplice of our children’s games; the poplar, of such pleasing protagonism in modern painting; the eucalyptus, with its aroma and overflowing height; the brachychiton, easy to take care of and acclimatize… They all accompany us and soothe our worries. The sight of a tree and the rippling of its branches swaying in the wind always bring serenity to our lives, as well as healing to the sick in their hospital enclosure. Their growth in our streets dates our days and hides many unfortunate architectures.
The hackberry, the poplar, the eucalyptus and the brachychiton, in addition to other species that we usually find in our urban landscape, make up the paper forest that the artist Dorothea von Elbe has devised for her new exhibition at Galería Rafael Ortiz, in Seville. This exhibition was conceived as an installation that fills the space and summons the visitors’ emotions. Von Elbe uses water-soluble graphite and walnut ink to capture the immediate nature of the stroke: its freshness, which has to express a story without corrections or hesitation, with the lightness and tension of an oriental calligraphy.

DOROTHEA VON ELBE was born in Dettmansdorf (Germany) in 1941. Later, she moved, along with her family, to the United States, where she became a U.S. citizen. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin, she studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Skowhegan, Maine), The New School for Social Research (New York) and Pratt Graphic Center (New York). She has lived and worked in Cordoba (Spain) since 1982.
With a long career dedicated to art in its various facets (drawing, painting, sculpture, photography…) Dorothea von Elbe builds her gaze from the direct observation of the nature that surrounds us, making her work appear to us as a dialogue between the inner and outer world, a recurring theme to which she keeps returning to make us reflect on the relationships that man establishes with Nature.
In her creations, silent, orderly and with a delicate use of color, the individual object ends up becoming an icon of the absolute.
She has had solo exhibitions in Spain and the United States and her work is present in important public collections: Colección Testimonio de la Caixa, Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid), …