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Amalia Broecker Jakob at the Germanic Institute

Amalia Broecker Jakob was born in 1942 in Yugoslavia and spent most of her life in Zagreb. Today she lives in Opicina and is presenting her debut solo exhibition. In Zagreb, she completed her studies in philology and studied art history under Professors Gamulin and Prelog. She published poems. A weight is palpable in her paintings, resulting from her diverse education and various activities.

There is a continuous effort to express the essential and to depict it correctly in images. This leads her to paint small paintings consisting of few strokes, and to extend the discussion to eight painting cycles, each dealing with a theme: Apples, Garden, Adriatic, Pines, Zagreb and the Mountains of Zagreb, The Path to Light, Corn, Markus. It is based on an interpretation of truth that is already a pictorial form (shape) - color, color spot.

Unlike music, her Neo-Divisionism does not consist of a recognized figure. The truth occasionally acts like another incentive. But it is truly unstable. It could slip from one's hands. Therefore, Broecker-Jakob develops the cyclical discourse towards symbolist meanings. She does this with grace and moderation. Sometimes she expands the spirals, the spirals of spots, up to the allusion to a cosmogonic vision. Elsewhere, she assigns an existing color the task of representing a certain state of mind. The two systems interfere with each other, and that is the main reason for the interest. Broecker-Jakob is a painter who can be studied with respect.

GIULIO MONTENERO THE LITTLE, TRIEST 1977

The symbolic "apple" in the painting by Lia Jakob

It is not painting if the color remains silent. Here is Lia Jakobs' "Picture Diary": watercolors, tempera, oil - these are perceptions, wishes, hopes. What distinguishes this painter from others who, like her, deal with the often troubled expression of contemporary art is an imaginative attitude that springs from a source of continuous emotions.

The lines form the primary structure of the image architecture, and the colors are the chromatic scores that bring the painted surfaces to life. Colors can conceal a drama or decipher the truth.

Color and psychology, as well as their reflection in life, are for Lia Jakob the roots of an intimate feeling that leads the artist to recognize her own source of life in the color red: an existence that is sometimes beautified with gold and more. However, the suspicion and threat posed by black weigh heavily.

Jakob's "red" is an individually "learned" color and the color of blood, life, love, revolutions. It is a motor element that, when it has something intense and energetic about it, also expresses decisions, victories, joys. These colors - red and precious gold and black, as well as the other colors the painter loves, namely the yellow that illuminates, the green of spring on the still brown fields, the blue of a cheerful folklore - unite very unique themes: the apple, the trees. An "apple" that must be "read" in the situational context of the painting; the tree archetypes or ideals of proto-trees that embody human figures; that point us to social situations, adaptations, or needs.

The absolute protagonist in Lia Jakob's paintings is always an apple. Amidst the tangle of black branches that threaten it from all sides, or spinning freely on the white sheet, a beautiful red apple, which is heart and nest, strives for unacknowledged tenderness, protection, and security.

An apple from which joy and pain radiate: an apple that opens full of love; that emits many small colored dots, a kind of confetti, or is divided into colored stripes; an apple, often tearful, whose drops form a halo or gather in streams at its base; or finally even sick and trampled in its vegetative fullness. These paintings, in which the artist sometimes lies on the ground, express the urgency to feel a more direct contact with them.

He acts close to nature by spreading the colors with his hands: the "brush fingers" then expand, and the color spots growing from the inside spread out and form the contours of the fruit.

Here, the painter almost evokes a peculiarity, a gesture of acceptance, with the circular movement of her hand, creating new spatial depths. This theme, so lyrically caressed by the voice of color, enlivens a rhythmic-musical experience that merges and intertwines with the artist herself: a theme with which Lia Jakob identifies and lives in longing to experience community.

In a kind of emotional-psychological dictate, the artist thus connects with the imaginary navel of his love, all his feelings; he allows himself to be pushed into the center of fertility, into an intimate and secret space that makes his heart the temple of a harmonious cosmos.

LUIGI DANELUTTI SMALL ILLUSTRATED TRIEST 1979

Color and sound work together in their art

Lia Broecker-Jakob then read some of her poems in Croatian and German as an introduction to her work, in order to achieve a denser interpretation of her pictures through the interplay of color and sound. Feelings from her old and new home on the Rhine merged together.

It seems that the task of this artist is to free herself from the sensory illusion of ephemeral life and to depict the absolute essence that lives behind the appearance we see. The subject is still recognizable in the figurative, but as a symbol it is already elevated to a higher level of meaning: This is a turning inward and outward at the same time.

The dissolution of known orders, the separation of the connecting element, the autonomy of the individual parts, the dynamization of the static are reflected in the variations of the basic motif "apples," which seem to be playfully developed from the form. Melancholic estrangement and encrypted anxiety about time, the search for home and insecurity look at us equally.

These images exert an unusual fascination on the viewer. The situations have taken on a life of their own: folkloric elements stand directly opposite the sparsely designed landscape experiences within a single image, compelling it to unity.

Besides this myth-making, there is the view that the noblest tendency of color must be to serve expression as much as possible. All shades of color appear without bias; their expressive values impose themselves on interpretation. It is recognized that the choice of colors here is not based on any scientific theory, but on observation and feeling alike.

The experiences of the painter's irritability bring the complementary colors like red and green into play and thus have a doubly strong effect, even symbolically. The variations of the apple, a motif of stylistic permutation, eternal change, and various social embeddings, reflect joy, pain, love, fertility, and memory. The series "Bora," named after the sharp katabatic wind of the Adriatic, impresses through its extensive abstraction, for wind itself is not paintable, but its consequences can be captured.

They are at the center, and she describes the manifold influences of her life, her personal "Homeless in the Homeland" shows the artist in search of a new way of life up to the Middle Rhine.

They are the attempt at a symbiosis, a coexistence of heterogeneous elements, as they slumber in every person, whether recognized or unrecognized.

In the 6th section "My city is a great remembrance tonight," childhood and youth memories are recorded and artistically realized.

Viewed as a whole, this is the complete work of a painter who, in her powerful creative joy, finds new forms of symbolic design and manages to present herself to the viewer not only as an artist but also as a person.

LEOPOLD ENZGRABER, RHEIN ZEITUNG, 1980

I feel my presence through the secret sense of an image

His

In a single line of poetry, arbitrarily selected from hundreds of written thoughts, moments of life and definitions are reflected that not only determine the artistic starting point of the personality. Rather, they encompass large parts of everyday existence, and Amalija Broecker-Jakob describes this existence in image and word because it is not exclusively her own. It concerns all of us, even if some peculiarities in the artist's life path naturally have to set different accents, which, shaped into images, initially seem unusual. If one does not shy away from a little pathos, the basic situation could be quite aptly described as "uprooting," from which Lia Broecker-Jakob derives her reflections on life and art, on humans and the environment, or on aesthetic experience as such. For the most constant constant in her life is probably the geographical-topographical change, a restless wandering from country to country, from one unfamiliar place to another, forced by circumstances. How could that not affect a sensitive consciousness, even unconsciously? In the gradual changes of the chosen forms, but also of the content in the images, every slight tremor of the increasingly uncertain ground can be read. The Yugoslav homeland becomes the resting, reliable center in this constellation and is linked with corresponding affects of longing, without, however, showing the so frequent sentimental image metaphors whose aesthetic overwhelming power many artists succumb to without resistance. Lia's works are of a much more complex nature, although given the move from Yugoslavia to Italy or Germany, the "uprooting" indeed, one might grant a comparatively simple perspective of crude curiosity about the other, the intuited but unknown. Determinations from various sides arise very quickly today in the art world, so that it often takes considerable effort to break free from "image" constraints. At some point, Lia discovered the tradition-laden and symbolically rich form of the apple as an aesthetic sign, as an embodiment of female and male principles and their connection: A truly fruitful engagement with the possibilities contained therein began.

The exhibition last year at her fellow artist Otto Schliwinski's place in Essen, however, surprisingly painted a completely different picture of the artist personality Lia. There was no trace of a fixed metaphor; the persistent observation of the processes in the land that has momentarily become her "home" corresponds to the stubborn search for the adequate formal expression – the age-old fundamental problem for the artist. It is the "feeling out" from the poem line of the title that experimentally welcomes the unexpected intrinsic value of many everyday objects and their painterly structures. However, these are not used arbitrarily but precisely denote psychological reactions to the artist's concern about what moves and threatens us daily in our world today. At the same time, the respective coloration in the image is chosen and coordinated extremely sensitively, and even without in-depth knowledge of the color theories that have evolved since antiquity, the intended mood (a term quite discredited in our art scene but here certainly deserving of an upgrade) is conveyed to the unprejudiced viewer by its emotionally straightforward impact. In this process, the "skin-close" visible craftsmanship gains its importance as an equally important component of persuasiveness: it consciously derives from known patterns of textile handiwork, indeed using them quite literally as printing stencils or graphic models that are traced. The danger is great that with such always recognizable formal elements one might slip into a nostalgically tinged traditional painting that would convey nothing but the endless sorrow over what is irretrievably lost. Everyone today is familiar with the partly lamentable results made possible by the unscrupulous exploitation of folk art – the Yugoslav example of the so-called "Naive Art" and its commercial exploitation in other countries may illustrate the extent of this danger.

Lia resists such tendencies, which ultimately lead to a leveled aesthetic consumerism, with her archetypally effective visual language of egg and apple, net and ladder, door and grid, grasses and trees, shells and threads, but also: vermin and plastic rings from beverage cans. All these things merge individual feelings from one's own social condition with overarching, time-related phenomena concerning humans and the environment in general. The destruction of the familiar ambiance, loss of human warmth, the concreting of the environment, fear of war, and fear of the unpeaceful nature of humans are reflected in the special use of these objects. Monotony and lack of freedom materialize in monochrome, while aggression and fear break out in strongly emotionally charged colors. In this way, the mood of an entire nation can be visualized, and foreign eyes undoubtedly see more sharply. Yet they always look poetically, able in their most intense red-blue combinations to reflect the wildness of a Yugoslav karst landscape as well as the unfathomably simmering political-social emotions in the currently hosting Germany.

Lia consistently refuses to resort to non-committal lyricism or to cater to the still widespread feeling in this country for the "exotic appeal" of certain visual details. The "feeling out of the present" succeeds with a rich, sensually and emotionally highly developed range of pictorial possibilities that communicates without rambling uncontrollably. "In Search of the Door" – this title also precisely describes the artist's situation and her life-defining adherence to utopia in the broadest sense.

Lia will probably only discover such utopian entrances and exits in her homeland.

Ingo Bartsch

THREADS AND LACE AS PAINTING MOTIFS

Unique graphics by LIA Jakob Broecker are exhibited at the Bauinstitut, who is better known in Zagreb as an expert in German studies, having worked as an active educational staff member for eight years. She studied painting in Essen with the painter Otto Schliwinski. Her efforts to delve into the principles of painting, to experiment with printing lace as a template, and to create unique graphics in her own specific way, distance her from amateurism (which we mean more as a genre than a status).

LIA Jakob Broecker grew up in Županja, and threads, lace, and embroidery were part of her everyday life from a young age. Like many painters, her childhood in the countryside became an inexhaustible source of inspiration. This folkloric detail of her biography took on new and even stronger dimensions when she went abroad (she now lives and works in Rome).

Your main focus in this print cycle is threads. The threads she has encountered since childhood, which in the diligent hands of women transformed into beautiful embroideries and lace, into stories. The threads in the graphics by LIA Jakob Broecker hang like free abstract patterns or are woven into hints of experiences and feelings. Prints of original Slavonian lace are transformed on paper or silk sheets into a new beauty that is content with itself, or they blend into a part of the landscape. While some graphics, with their play of colors from dark to very fine light tones, are simply appealing and decorative and symbolize certain moods, some graphics, with their more complex composition (and the introduction of figurative elements), appear as mature achievements. They contain the poetry of a very refined painter. We believe that the further creativity of this painter will follow this path.

BRANKA HLEVNJAK, EYE, 1982

FLIGHT MELODY

Inspired by a subtle fabric that almost resembles the chain of a cloth, the narrative side of Lia Broecker-Jakob (born in Yugoslavia and in love with Rome) develops through delicate poetic modulations, sensitive to the figure of carefully discovered things and perception. What follows is a chromatic structure that pays attention to the balance of tone and motivated risk (the hint of its red tones) and aligns the story with fantasy and metaphor (see the insistence on the symbolic value of the apple), "so that the evocative power arises," accompanying the individual phases, dissolving into fleeting visual melodies.

VITO APULEO (il Messaggero, January 1985)

RICCARDO REIM FOR LIA

There is a strange and unusual (but not too much: dream and nightmare are universal) analogy between Lia Broecker's paintings and those of Füssli. In the spots, the color blends, the scribbles of his creations, figures and small animal figures nest, little ladies dressed in black, dwarfs, and large or small well-known monsters, never anything in between – together with the constant symbol of the apple, original and philosophically enticing. Ripe and rosy apple like the cheek of a girl or dry and gray like the ash of a now ice-cold fire. The apple can be divided into four parts (kabbalistic and perfect number expressing the sequence of the seasons) or united in a single sphere, sensual and infinite. An apple like an uncut umbilical cord from Drohpia's childhood (in this case in the East), which survives in the memory of peasant smells and patient women's work, of long, very cold days, marked by the penetrating scent of home-preserved fruits. A painting to read, noted by Lia like a real intimate diary, meticulously recording facts, events, and words: The cruel path of memories winds sinuously and seemingly inaccessible between the spirits of people etc.) Disappearing forever in a kind of move, the auction (especially for oneself) of everything that now lies behind us, past but always present.

ROM, 1985

THE WORLD IS AN APPLE

The apple is the scent of a completely internalized femininity, the symbol of hope and a city, Rome. It is a small, perfect core for any communication, in which old emotions, new wonder, playful curiosities are enclosed in the round language of affections, fishing between the levels of memory and pulling out unusually connected, sometimes dreamlike images from the heart – like from the hair of a magician. The sometimes desperate, sometimes clear and calm search is for harmony, a whole into which one can reintegrate or in which one can close oneself off, to belong to the most beautiful aspects of immanentist thinking, as it is written. Lia Broecker's paintings are painted in oil on handmade paper and are accompanied by a beautiful catalog of numbered copies, entirely created by the painter using artisanal methods, as well as a series of texts. The apple is subject to this: a "structure in constant motion, often combined with very elaborate lace, in compulsive remembrance of the Slavic tradition." The thread with its numerous, difficult and intertwined courses represents a counterpoint to the bare and primitive vitality of the fruit, in which the woman sees the traces of an identity.

ISABELLA DONFRANCESCO

(The Book Informer, 1985)

AMALIA BROECKER-JAKOB

Her painting seems to arise from a thoughtful and strict program, carried out with essential means and tight rhythms, from which the voices of the heart nevertheless shine through. The clear disentanglement of the expressive signs (mainly light filigree chains, sequences of small connected rings, flexible threads and ribbons, sketches like petals or confetti, etc.), the mostly controlled expansion of color values and the general geometry of the joints, all condemn the attempt to build a constant harmony of thought, which is also the dominion of instinct or the feeling of life.

Rather, the search for harmony, which tends to fixate on the musicality of the modules and the persistence of certain themes, is realized through subtle and complex variations, with a wisdom that constantly seems to doubt itself and experimentally proposes its own reasons, even the most secret ones of the heart. Therefore, the control of feelings is much more apparent than real: it works as long as the emotional tension breaks out and tears the threads of the intellect.

And the figuration, the sign, and the color gradually emerge from the figurative reflection, then, also through the concern for a programmatic normativity, the image from the boundaries of the backgrounds; they act, intervene, and live freely on the surface in an open and suggestive, imaginary dimension full of symbolic meanings. The unsymbolic variations in the intimate and fertile context of the artist and his cosmos. The image becomes a pretext and the fixation on the theme or subject is an incentive for analysis.

Among the symbolic references, the apple is undoubtedly the most fascinating: whole or halved, firm or crushed, alone or among others, the apple is always the sign of a state of mind that sometimes reaches naturalistic tones of vivid transparency and high lyricism for semantic effectiveness and for its numerous "I am an apple," as if it wanted not only to point to its imaginative versatility or its values, which are also endowed with an extraordinary poetic vein – it wrote about itself: "I am a woman," biblical-mythical connotations. It is no coincidence that the artist – affective and creative, but also her conscious participation in life, her fate as a woman – represents the true meaning of life.

MARIO D'ONOFRIO, Rome, 1985

NEW TIROLER ZEITUNG - 13/ Culture

Words and images overcome boundaries

THE EXPERIENCE Italy as a creative impulse, expressed in word and image: that was the commonality of two encounters on Monday, which the Italian Cultural Institute conveyed at the university and in the Raiffeisen Hall at the marketplace.

By JUTTA HÖPFEL

For Amalia Broecker-Jakob, a Germanist from Zagreb living in Rome, who was stimulated and educated in both Italy and Germany, the departure from her Croatian homeland was also a departure of her own personality, unleashing both her painterly and literary vitality. Just as Germany trained her intellect, Italy trained her senses. The result is poems that reveal a suggestive abundance of images, and paintings full of narrative inspiration. A selection of these paintings is now hanging in the exhibition space of the Faculty of Humanities. Univ.-Prof. Dr. Zoran Konstantinovic, head of the Institute for Comparative Literature, was able to welcome prominent figures from the public, consular, and cultural sectors as well as many interested students as host at the opening on Monday.

The mixed techniques of Amalia Broecker do not reveal themselves to the viewer at first glance; they only disclose their secrets after loving immersion. These are images that reveal much autobiographical content. From her Zagreb homeland, the artist may have brought a preference for fine lace, which, combined with other delicate webs, represents a typically feminine craftsmanship. The painting surface also plays a role: silk sometimes or repeatedly appearing interpretively in these compositions, almost as signals of the handmade laid paper, as it is still produced today in the ancient Cartiera Amatruda in Amalfi, is the material on which the artist works with ink pen, watercolor, or occasionally oil. Like fleeting fragments of thoughts and memories, graphic signs and symbols rise from the subtle, calm color tones: rosettes of Roman basilicas, capitals of ancient columns, domes, stones, old masonry, battlements of medieval castles—always surrounded by veils and transparent fabrics, poetic images, risen from dreams and created again to dream, full of reminiscences and longings. "Come along the Via Appia Antica," they seem to say, "let yourself be carried away by the silent dust of times into a world of fantasy, into the intermediate realm of dreams, where present and past flow into each other..."

LIA BROECKER-JAKOB

Born in 1942 in Županja (Yugoslavia).
1968 Studies in German Studies and Art History in Zagreb, Frankfurt am Main, Nuremberg, and Dresden.
1969-1975 pedagogical activity in Zagreb.
1972 publication of workbooks for German lessons.
From 1975 to 1985, she lived in Belgrade, Trieste, Boppard on the Rhine, Rome, and Munich.
In 1979, she began studying painting.
Publication of the poetry collection "Htjedoh jabuku rascrvenit".
1979 Award for the picture "Boppard in Germany" in the competition of Rhenish banks, inclusion in the wall calendar.
1984 Publication of the poetry collection "Poesie" in German and Italian.
Currently lives and works in Rome and Munich.

EXHIBITIONS

1977 Goethe-Institut, Triest.
1978 Palazzo Costanzi, Triest.
1979 Biblioteca Germanica, Milan, with the Galleria Carini, Milan.
1980 Galerie Burg Rheinfels.
1981 Galerie "Atelier", Essen.
1982 Gallery "Prozori", Zagreb, Construction Institute, Zagreb, Municipality of Velletri.
1985 Galleria "Tempo d'oro", Rome, Galleria "Leonardo da Vinci", Rome, University of Innsbruck with the exhibition "Image and Poetic Thought".

Solo exhibitions

1977 Goethe-Institut, Triest.
1978 Palazzo Costanzi, Triest.
1979 Biblioteca Germanica and Carini Gallery, Milan.
1982 Galerie Prozori, Zagreb, and Bauinstitut, Zagreb.
1984 Town Hall of Veletri.
1985 Galleria Golden Time, Rome, Galerie Leonardo da Vinci, Rome.
1988 Goethe-Institut, Munich.
1989 Galeria Maatois, Munich, Galima Hanfitaengel, Munich, Galerie "Quality of Life", Munich.
1990 Gallizia Art Nouveau, exhibition and literary event titled "Signora terra".
1996 Gallena Veliki kraj, Županja.
2000 Mandala Exhibition, Skale Kirc Laboratory, Dragan Sekulić.
2002 Exhibition at the art gallery, Pula, Exhibition Intuitive Drawing, Pula, at the art gallery.
2004 exhibition in the forum room of the Diana Gallery, dedicated to her village Kavran.
2005 Prayer cycle "Let us pray with the angels", prayers on handmade paper.
2008 Exhibition "Gold Files", paintings, tapestries, and embroideries from the Posavina Gallery Veliki kraj Zupanja.
2010 Exhibition "Golden Thread", tapestry exhibition, Galerie Veliki Kraj Zupanja.
2011 Exhibition about the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, Malilive Gallery Kamenite priče Valle.
2012 exhibition of monotype (graphic) prints, Ararai, Posavina embroideries, and artistic books with handmade paper, Italian municipalities Rovinj, titled "Sleeping on my grandmother's lace pillow are the masters."
Study trips to North America, visits to the Hepi Indians, China, England, Spain, pearl content in an artist colony in Mallorca and Morocco.
Since 1975, she has been living and working as an artist in Germany and Italy. Currently, she lives and works in the studio in her home village Kavran, 52208 Krnica.

Lia-Art, the original from artlia