Edith Hillinger was born in Berlin. Germany. She spent her formative years in Turkey and moved to the United States as a young adult. She studied art at New York University and Cooper Union School of Art. She was an Artist-in-Residence at the MacDowell Colony and Montalvo Center for the Arts. She has shown her work in numerous one person and group exhibitions n the United States and Europe. For Edith Hillinger's fullresume and images of her current work go to: www.edithhillinger.com  or www.Togonongallery.com

NPS Artist Residency Gallery

•contact: ehillinger@earthlink.net

ENCHANTED GARDENS

Edith Hillinger and the Magic of the Real

Edith Hillinger’s art has a strange intensity and dramatic power. Her flowers and plants throb with an inner life and passion that draw us into the heart of her imagined world. Like real plants, these painted forms seem to be alive, caught up in the minutiae of processes of growth, maturation, and decline. It is easy to see that this art grows out of a lifetime of close-up observation of the details of the natural world. Edith works with all the precision of a scientist, studying microscopic forms under magnifying lenses, noting the visible changes of plant forms in the course of a day and a week. But then she turns magician. Before our eyes we see startling fusions of outer and inner worlds, blending observation, memory and imagination.

The education of an artist starts at birth. Edith is a Berliner, richly endowed with the quick verbal wit that this city has long been noted for. Her father, Franz Hillinger, was an architect associated with Bruno Taut. Taut, one of Germany’s leading modernist architects, left Germany in 1936 and lived in Turkey until his death in 1938. The Hillingers also left Nazi Germany around this time and joined the German community in exile in Istanbul. With young Edith went early memories of playing among flowers in a farmhouse garden on the outskirts of Berlin, as her grandmother talked and tended the plants. This was her first enchanted garden, lost before she was five.

In her father’s library in Istanbul, Edith discovered a wonderful book of photographs by artist and sculptor Karl Blossfeldt titled Art Forms in the Plant World. Blossfeldt taught at the Combined State Schools of Fine and Applied Art in Berlin, and the 120 photographs showing enlargements of parts of plants (and noting the precise degree of enlargement in each case) were originally intended simply as teaching aids. They captivated his readers by showing affinities between architectural and artistic forms and the forms of the plant world.

Back in the late eighteenth century, the poet and polymath Goethe had already embarked on a lifelong study of the role of metamorphosis in nature and the workings of form as a dynamic process in nature and in art. He coined the term morphology to denote a field that has since spawned gestalt psychology and many other areas of research. In this era before genetics were understood, Goethe and others were already striving to see nature as an organic totality, not divisible into outer shell and inner kernel. He was interested in the ancient belief in correspondences between outer and inner worlds, between the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of our universe. Perhaps science could unravel what magic and art had expressed through symbols.

In 1948 the Hillinger family moved to New York City. Here Edith attended Cooper Union (1960–1964), dreamt of the fields of Turkey ablaze with red poppies, and crammed her apartment with plants. In her Berkeley garden, poppies are a special love. Because the studio is in the garden, there is no strict line of demarcation between the creation of form in art and the study of the created forms of nature. Both evolve. Each day is an experiment, a drama involving interplay between organic and inorganic forms — plants, humans, Olivetti her cat, birds, soil, climate, paintbrushes, pigments, water, paper.

In March 2005 Edith arrived for a month as artist in residence at New Pacific Studio Mount Bruce, New Zealand. The day after her arrival she started work in the wilderness garden around the house, photographing an orange-black tiger lily that had just sprung up in the bark garden below the dining room window. Like Blossfeldt, but using a digital camera, she explored its shape through many magnifications. Later that week, she found her subject for the residency by spending an hour alone with her camera and tripod in the lush native bush at the national wildlife center, Pukaha Mount Bruce, right next door. These works embody her magic realism; they are invitations to observe, to remember, and to contemplate the mystery and the radiance of what we call the real world, filtered through one artist’s shaping consciousness.

Kay Flavell
New Pacific Studio. Vallejo, June 2005