Time Track
“Barbara Beisinghoff uses etching in order to develop from a starting point continuous new superimposing compositions. That means that she prints an etching from the copper plate in order to develop the printing plate further. After the next print, the reworking carries on and so forth. These etchings are called states. In contrast with etchings in an edition, they are unique. Barbara Beisinghoff loves this process, especially for her larger formats. In the exhibition you can see various states, although most of us would not realise that they can be traced back to one plate. Only after detailed scrutiny of separate motifs can you discover specific forms which are identical. Over two decades, forty different works came into being from one etching plate. During this long process, in which the time factor became a contributor, the lines, signs and figures became ever denser. It would actually take hours to be able to decipher the time track etchings. Constructive elements emerge, faces and grimaces, botanical and organic forms, and in the upper right-hand corner images covered with signs, runes and letters.”
Dirk Schwarze, exhibition The Law of the Star and the Formula of the Flower, Bad Arolsen, 2014
Landscape
“Barbara Beisinghoff converts the living interior of her head and transports it as a ‘landscape’ into her pictures. We, the observers, do not experience objects but calm, gentle, intensive inter-active relationships. Once we have focussed for longer and compare the row of ‘states’, which means advancing and retreating, and again going forward: we then find ourselves in the middle of these pictures. We experience the images as belonging to reality in their states of time. In this way Barbara Beisinghoff helps one to perceive things better, and that means: to open one’s mind." Dietrich Mahlow, Seeheim
Mother of Pearl
Etchings following Hayter are picturesque and yet colours are strictly separated from one another, depending on how high or low they were settled on the printing plate with various depths, so that a rice terrace landscape effect appears. Blue in narrow deeply etched lines of the intaglio plate appears dark; in polished hollows it shimmers bright and delicate like mother-of-pearl. In these vales made smooth by direct etching blue only remains protected from the wiping palm of the printer’s hand on the slope. The bottom of the valley is rubbed clean. A second and third lazure is rolled onto the intaglio or gravure plate with a harder and a softer hand roller. No print is like any other. One’s breathing plays a role while moving the roller, depending from which side of the plate one applies the colour layer and with how much pressure one handles the roller.
Childhood
"A house of imagination and dream is reached, exactly seen in all its details, nothing seems blurred. A house like something special, only built for him or her, with entrances, stairs: a refuge, surrounded by water, a dream to be entered, if you take the right way across that bridge and staircase. Above the house a flag flutters in the wind like a toy, light, not to be missed, graceful, a hope, a movable object. That is what hopes look like. That is what the expected looks like. It is taking on a form.”
Age of Life, Karl Krolow, Darmstadt
1. Etching 'Windless'
"To inhabit copper prints. These words, I often imagine, are small houses with basements and attics. Common sense lives on the ground floor. To climb up in the house of words means to abstract from stair to stair. To descend to the basement means dreaming, means losing oneself in distant corridors of an uncertain mythology, means looking for treasures one cannot find… All small things demand slowness. One has to love the space in order to describe it in minute details as if there were a world of molecules, as if one could enclose an entire spectacle in the molecule of a drawing." The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
