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Darya von Berner (México, 1959) is a Spanish artist and stage director. In recent years she has dedicated herself mainly to installations and performances in public spaces as well as to the opera. Her mother is of Spanish origin and her father from Russian. Since she was sixteen she lives in Madrid. Her great-grandmother Mercedes Pinto, was a writer and pioneer of the Spanish feminist movement. Luis Buñuels film Él (1952) is based on her novel of the same name, which was published in 1926. Von Berner spent her childhood and school days in Mexico City, where she attended the Celestin Freinet school. At this time she maintained a correspondence with A.S. Neill (Summerhill school). Later she enrolled at the Madrid school, which was founded by Spanish Republicans in Exil.

Trayectoria profesional
Her artistic education began with Milton Glaser (School of Visual Arts, New York) and. Enzo Cucchi, in Urbino, Italy. Later Wolf Vostell invited her for a residency at the Fluxus archives in the Museo Vostell Malpartida in Cáceres. Afterwards she participated in various seminars at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, with Antonio López, Navarro Baldeweg, Eduardo Arroyo and later at the CGAC with Janis Kounellis and Tony Cragg. From 1984 she works as an artist and receives various prizes, which lead her first to Paris and then to the Academia Española de Bellas Artes en Rome.

1991 is the year when a long international tour begins, with exhibitions in Europe, Asia and America and a regular presence in Art Basel, ARCO and Art Cologne. Darya von Berner is also a graduate of philosophy and student of Simón Marchán (UNED).

At the beginning of her life as an artist, Darya von Berner devoted herself to painting in the landscape. She made an intense experience of unity with the natural world, whereby painting the environment actually only served as an excuse for close observation. This state ended abruptly: whilst painting, she became a witness to a massive human intervention in the natural environment. This shock prompted her deep desire to understand the world and mankind in its actions better, hence she turns to intellectual reflection, to philosophy. This search is reflected in an ephemeral art, with large-scale wall paintings that depict animals on the brink of extinction and later with semi-transparent photographic installations in architectural dimensions ("Los ojos de Rada", PhotoEspaña 2000). Her predilection for thinking and critical art theory leads to a friendship with Pierre Restany, who writes "La Peau de Dehors" in the accompanying catalog of one of her exhibitions [1], in which he speaks about the perceptive experience of of the skin. Achille Bonito Oliva dedicates her work in the Gallery Triebold in Basel the text "Holy Ecology"

An enthusiasm for the ideas of Vilém Flussers prepares the ground for another central theme in her work, her ongoing debate with form. A phase begins in which she creates objects of a strong symbolic nature, where the form of things and concepts is revealed as a kind of imprisonment. Whether it is wall painting, sculpture, photography or installation, von Berner’s primary concern is the creation of experiences. For this reason, she  coins the "atmosphere" when she talks about her works. An atmosphere in which one can participate in, into which one immerses, in which one makes its own experience. These atmospheres are mostly site-specific and often make use of new energy-efficient technologies. Hubertus von Amelunxen writes about her exhibition “Ursprung, Vernunft und Tod” a tribute to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg at the Kunstverein Göttingen: “The point is a place, it is inside and outside, it marks both, the fullness and the edge, just like the place is marking the utmost end, the brim, the hemline, the blade, the limit.” Her friend, the philosopher Wolfgang Welsch and von Berner unites the belief in the fundamental idea, that the artistic experience and the experience of culture, reestablish unity of the world, between Homo Sapiens and nature, in contrast to the still-prevalent conception of modernity, which regards man and nature as two spheres that are alien to one another.

In 2007 the artist created a cloud consisting of water and air, which hovered in front of the Puerta de Alcala (La Nube de la Puerta de Alcala). As a work of art, this cloud was an attempt in creating a continuum, in spite of the constantly changing form of liquids, in space and time. An idea similar to the still unresolved Navier-Stokes equation, which addresses the problem of preserving form in a constantly changing environment.

In the cloud flags, that she designed for the town of Verbania, and also in the installation in front of the Peace Palace in The Hague, this endeavour has found a further expression.

Her current operatic performance YO_Land (2016), based on Piotr Iljitsch Tchaikovsky's opera Iolanta, was staged at various open-air locations - exposed to natural phenomena such as rain, wind and ambient sounds. There was no seating for the audience, which had to follow the singers from one location to another. The light installation (Selfi), (2016), her latest work, engages in a dynamic physical experience of the viewers. Von Berner believes that the art world is not isolated from other life-systems, and with her works she tries to create new spaces, in which the work of art and the spectator are not separated, but interpenetrate one another, as a single living organism.

In 2018 she was invited by Festival de Luz y Vanguardias of  Salamanca to make an intervention on the facade of the Major Schools of the University of Salamanca for which she created her work Veravenus (videomapping)

She has written for the newspaper El País, "Margarete and her impeccable kitchen" about the German architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky who designed in 1926 the functional kitchen that revolutionized the domestic kitchens.

Enlaces externos

 * http://www.mataderomadrid.org/ficha/5104/(selfi).html
 * http://www.daryavonberner.net
 * https://vimeo.com/154795466
 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xy7qaDgZtY