Exhibition by Lisa Maria Stybor opens

From 16 October to 16 December 2022, the University Library will be showing the exhibition "Dialogues against Forgetting" by Lisa Maria Stybor. The exhibition was opened with a vernissage on 16 October in the presence of the artist.
Lisa M. Stybor, born in Aachen in 1953, is a painter and draughtswoman. She taught at the universities in Aachen and Düsseldorf as well as at the School of Art in Norman, Oklahoma, and the Rochester Institute of Technology, New York. From 1993 to 2016, she worked as a professor for colour, surface, space in the departments of design and architecture at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in Dessau. On her cycle "Dialogues against Forgetting", the artist comments: "The further the Second World War recedes into the history books, the more abstract it becomes for us. There are only a few eyewitnesses left who can vividly describe their terrible experiences. In this day and age, people have often become accustomed to horror and bad news. The facts, whether it is horror news or horrendous amounts of money being 'thrown around', we can often only understand in the abstract, but not emotionally relate to. That is exactly my concern - to perceive things less abstractly."

The artist created a series of paintings that, in their immediacy and forcefulness, have an impact on the viewer and evoke a personal reflection on the subject and the historical events. "Even in their dimension of destruction and dehumanisation, pain and suffering should remain comprehensible. For this reason, the word is juxtaposed here with pictorial expression, so that dialogues emerge that allow an approach other than the purely rational."

This exhibition is part of a series that tells the story of "hardship" in various references and expressions. The exhibition "Augustusburg - everywhere?!" is to be shown in Friedensau. Elsewhere, the focus was on "The Homeless from Zoo Station"; here the focus was not on painting, but: baking and distributing, directly feeding the homeless - for several years around Christmas time. In Dresden, "The Bombing in February 1945" was the focus of a group work in which poems about the war were read aloud in an audio installation, audible from loudspeakers, mounted in public space. Another important theme of their artistic exploration is the genocide of the Armenians.

In contrast to all this elementary and existential pain, she has developed series on the beauty of the world. She collects light moments from many different landscapes and countries, which appear both abstract and realistic. Lisa M. Stybor is a member of the Werkbund Berlin, where she currently lives.