Kerry Schuss Gallery

Press Release

Kerry Schuss will show all 22 pages of an album of collages by artist Birdie Lusch (1903 - 1988). Made in June and July of 1973, these collages, each representing a floral arrangement, were accompanied by an introductory and a closing poem. The pages will be presented in the order they originally appeared. Accompanying the exhibition will be a full size facsimile of the album published by KARMA, New York.

The image of flowers in a vase was one that Lusch returned to many times, each time with renewed inventiveness. The works here are wonderfully varied, even as they follow the same compositional formula: a pot filled with flowers, collaged from magazine cuttings and embellished with markers and ballpoint pen, sitting on a tabletop roughed in with brown marker.

Lusch was an inspired and thrifty bricoleuse who used whatever materials were on hand, re-purposing them into new, surprising concoctions wherein shirts, tulips and tires are refashioned into vases while noodles and carpeting are similarly transformed into flowers. A spirit of playful experimentation characterizes all of these works, whose apparent simplicity belies their visual and conceptual sophistication.

Flora cut from pictures of food and fabric and vessels deftly snipped from shots of interiors and landscapes slyly borrow the illusory depth of the photograph to create volume. A silhouetted tablecloth turned upside down, for example, becomes a fluted, dimensional form, while details of gathered curtains mimic cupped petals. Conversely, flowers excised from floral wrapping paper are startlingly full of life even as they continue to read as a flat design.

Her works' reductive forms, appropriation of real world images, and multiple perspectives connect Lusch to Modernist artists and ideas - from the Imagist poets to the Pop artists and from Picasso's newspaper collages to Rauschenberg's combines - completely unknown to her. At the same time, it's intimacy and directness relate it to the aesthetics of younger artists working today.

Birdie Lusch (1903 - 1988) was a self-taught artist from Columbus, Ohio. A factory worker for most of her adult life, she began making art as a teenager, frequently producing books and albums filled with drawings, collages, poetry and writing.
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