Barbara
Lekberg
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Press Excerpts |
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"[Barbara Lekberg] creates figures whose high emotional temperature might have been thought inexpressible in solic sculpture but which find an entirely suitable vehicle in this flexible medium. Had Delacroix been a sculptor he might have dealt similarly with dancing maenads, with women wailing into the wind, or with King Saul brooding over his troubles. For such are Miss Lekberg's subjects, all of them in one ecstatic state or another and none of them forcing the medium to bear more than it is capable of. Stuart Preston "Miss Lekberg bends her ability to a heroic task. Eschewing the hieratic pomp and primitive beatitude which decorate so much abstract and figurative sculpture today, she addresses herself to the verities of the human condition." Sidney Tillum "[Miss Lekberg's work] is concerned with lines of force defining space rathen than simple with mass displacing space. She celebrates the interaction of contour and air, of stasis and activity, and the harmonious balance between them. It calls us to the examination of basic feelings of life." Jean C. Harris "Miss Lekberg's control of bulk in space drawn out into a linear flow of movement, which is yet at rest, is splendidly accomplished. She is able to create a shythm of air around her superbly designed figures... which are held — almost nurtured — in positions of dramatic motion. What distinguishes her work, aside from its technical surety, is a tenderness and feeling for people contained within a discipline of emotion and an esthetic balance which is elegiac and even noble." Bennett Schiff "[Barbara Lekberg's] figures are always in superb motion, seeming to live in the focus of a cyclone, striving against nature's forces." Nathan Cabot Hale "Miss Lekberg has the uncanny ability of investing a personal and joyous momentum into the center of her work, as htough each piece were a new arena of discovery and challenge. The artist offers a rapturous flow of line, and an altogether musical thrust to gesture and expression...within a vortex of charged space. A lyric stop-go stream of action informs their movements, giving a kind of elasticity to the propulsion of their bodies. Acute abservation and understanding of the moving form in space lie at the core of these works, and one is continually in touch with a craftsman in full possession of her metier and vision...Barbara Lekberg releases her emotions by way of the dualities inherent in secure technique and an airborne imagination." John Gruen |