MARGOT S. NEUHAUS: OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT
Virtual Exhibition: Online May 19
Margot S. Neuhaus: Of Darkness and Light
The artistic trajectory of Margot Neuhaus began in Chicago,
during her studies of psychiatric social work and her work as a
psychotherapist. Within a few years, she was living in Washington
D.C. with her husband and two children, deeply engaged in art
making. Over the following decades, she created works in a variety
of media and took part in exhibitions both in the US and
internationally.
As of 2021, she and her husband reside in
Ann Arbor, Michigan, closer to their adult children. For both of
them, moving from one place to another is simply part of life. Her
husband grew up in a German-Jewish family in Brazil. She was born in
Mexico, to parents from the Polish-Jewish communities of Krakow and
Lvov, respectively. Her mother and father escaped the horrors of
World War II. Most of the members of their families did not. Like
millions of other Jewish people, they perished in concentration
camps.
The work of Margot Neuhaus is inseparable from
these aspects of her biography and the influences of the various
places she has called "home" throughout her life. Her childhood in
Mexico City exposed her to a language and a culture that she felt as
her own. Her world changed when her family moved to the
South-Eastern part of the USA, and then again when she went to
Chicago, before settling in Washington D.C. All of these places, as
well as those in Europe connected to her family history have made
her particularly sensitive to issues of identity: the qualities that
make people feel different from one another, as well as those
through which they recognize their kinship. These concerns are woven
into her work, both thematically and in terms of her visual
language.
One of her most pointed explorations of these ideas
is the series In Memoriam, created between 2005 and 2011. Using the
language of gestural abstraction, she addresses unspeakable
realities: the wanton destruction of lives and the necessary act of
remembrance, however painful that remembrance may be. Though these
ideas inform many of her works, she has often been reluctant to deal
with them explicitly-just as her parents were reluctant to speak of
their trauma as survivors. With In Memoriam, she breaks that silence
realizing that she has been trying to give visual form to the
unspeakable feelings of her parents, which she later recognizes as
her own: anguish, fear, rage, but also reconciliation and hope.
Closely related to this series is the cycle of paintings called
Outcry, dated between 2016 and 2020. These are some of the largest
and most ambitious of her two-dimensional works. Painted on unprimed
and unstretched canvases, they call to mind gigantic scrolls or
tapestries. Rather than tell stories, the artist uses powerful
abstract forms to give voice to emotions that defy language.
Like In Memoriam, Outcry is about her dismay at the human capacity
for cruelty. As she points out, however, these works express an
existential pain that goes beyond personal history and relates to
the suffering of the most vulnerable members of our community,
including minorities and refugees.
In contrast to the somber
tones and dynamic brushstrokes that define these raw, gestural
works, the series Light Motives, dated between 2008 and 2013, is
about the feeling of hope that can sustain a person even when
present as a mere glimmer of light. Created after In Memoriam, these
highly refined, minimalist works on paper hint at illumination-both
literally and metaphorically. Their subtlety demands that we slow
down, so that we can notice barely perceptible shifts in tones, or
the ways in which warm yellow and orange accents endow them with a
sense of vitality.
The Light Motives find a beautiful
counterpart in another cycle of works, titled of silence and dated
to 2020. Though Margot S. Neuhaus does not explicate their meanings,
the subtle shifts between strokes in pale cream and ochre tones
against the white "nothingness" express those meanings more
eloquently than words. As the Polish writer Wisława Szymborska would
note at one point, at the very moment you pronounce the word
"silence" you destroy it. This is also what Margot Neuhaus seems to
suggest with these works, inviting us to a contemplative experience,
rather than trying to convey a message.
The sculptures of
Margot Neuhaus are just as experimental in approach. Her largest
installations are Forest and Life Cycles, dated to 1991 ad 1982,
respectively. Her principal material in both of these groups is
wood-as raw as her unprimed canvases. The Forest is built from tree
trunks cut into sections of varying widths and stacked on top of one
another. These totem-like forms seem both artful and organic, as if
the artist were simply responding to nature's own impulses. This
sculptural group was shown at the Art Museum of the Americas in
1991. This dynamic exchange between shapes born from natural
processes and those created by human agency feels even stronger in
Life Cycles, which was exhibited first at the Earth Five
environmental sculpture show in Glen Echo, Maryland, in 1982. This
installation was also used for a site-specific performance
incorporating poetry and dance.
In parallel with paintings
and sculptures, Margot Neuhaus has always cultivated interest in
photography. Some of her photographs provide glimpses at faraway
places such as Indonesia or Kyrgyzstan. Many others are about the
wonders of nature that can be discovered in one's immediate
environment-in her case, the forests near her studio in Virginia.
These tranquil, often hazy views of nature are just one segment
of her photographic oeuvre. Her ability to focus on facets of the
visible world that one might easily overlook is even more emphasized
in her close-ups of flowers, both those at the peak of their bloom
and as they die away in front of our eyes. And just as in her
paintings and works on paper, these images affirm that less is
always more. They invite us to take the time to look and think, and
thus, perhaps, even feel some of the artist's own sense of joy as
she discovered these motifs.
Margot Neuhaus speaks about her
working process as a form of play with materials, textures, and
patterns. She tries to observe and respond to the medium itself-the
language of the wood grain, the surface of the paper, the fluidity
of paint. As she has often noted, she feels most fortunate when the
communication with the material goes beyond herself-and becomes part
of larger order. In moment like that, as she also adds, something
within her changes, and so does the work itself: "The door has been
opened a crack and a bit more light let in."