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Texto del catálogo de la exposición en la Galería Arcimboldo, Buenos Aires del 24 de junio al 12 de julio (Curadora: Alina Tortosa) y en la Fundación Rincón del Arte, Río Gallegos, Prov. De Santa Cruz del 16 al 27 de agosto de 2003.
The origins of contemporary identityEdith Matzen Hirsch was born in Bollingstedt, a small town in the north of Germany. She was eleven when her parents immigrated to Argentina. Since then she has been subject to the relations and tensions between her roots, her education influenced by different cultures, and her close and distant loves. The artist feels that she shares with others her initial sense of uprooting, a sense of loss and of nostalgic sadness, together with hope in the future and with the healing energy that powers long term illusion and the ability to create and to construe.
Her works draw the extended borders of an ethical and intellectual space that defines the mental territory to which she feels she belongs. Matzen sees herself in others across different cultures. This space without physical borders relates to long-term commitments to the well being of the community and to an unavoidable vocation to grasp the momentous sense of ancestral laws.
The artist believes that all peoples share essential values, whatever their religious or cultural traditions. She believes absolutely in a sort of redeeming goodness that links all those who strive for spiritual well being over mean impulses.
The birds in her white paintings are symbols of migration; they fly over horizons that the artist has embroidered on the canvas. This gesture, linked to traditional female handwork, stands for her will to extend to infinity the limits of the world she belongs to.
Matzen Hirsch insists that the sufferings caused by some are healed by others through the unconscious energy called forth by those deep-rooted laws. This is the origin of the artists’ books in which she summarizes through symbols and writing the ten commandments, the value of which are not under discussion. She is fully conscious of the material she uses and of the content of her work. They are well cared for creations, visually austere and rich at the same time, sensual and minimalist, aristocratic, in which words hint, suggest, and dictate succinctly the basic codes of coexistence to defeat chaos, confusion and the general malaise of an alienated world.
Traducción: Alina Tortosa
