Barbara Bachtell

BARBARA BACHTELL – BIO

Barbara Bachtell is a Cleveland Heights-based artist who grew up in Hudson, Ohio, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Albuquerque, New Mexico inspired by her artistically inclined family: her mother was an artist and writer, her great-uncle hand-lettered movie posters for Morgan Lithograph, and one brother is a cartoonist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker. She has a B.A. in Visual Art from Wesleyan University (CT) and a B.F.A. in Painting from Cleveland Institute of Art. She has incorporated both text elements and organic forms into her work for many years, and is a published poet and writer as well as a visual artist. Her drawings and small sculptures have been exhibited throughout Ohio and in Wisconsin, including at: Artists Archives of the Western Reserve; the Beachwood Community Center Art Gallery, Beck Center; William Busta Gallery; the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art/MOCA; the Cleveland Museum of Art May Show; the College of Wooster; Cuyahoga Community College; Firelands Association for the Visual Arts (FAVA); Firelands College of Bowling Green State University; Karamu House; Kent State University; John Michael Kohler Art Center; Lakeland Community College; the Morgan Conservatory; Park Synagogue; Ohio University, Chillicothe; The Sculpture Center; SPACES; University of Akron; Florence O’Donnell Wasmer Gallery, Ursuline College; Waterloo Arts and YARDS PROJECTS at Worthington Yards. She also created a site-specific, time-based sculpture for the University School Centennial Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition. She was a curator for Slavic Village Development’s first Rooms to Let event (artists’ installations in vacant houses), and an Ohio Arts Council Artist-in-Residence. Her work is in collections of: The Cleveland Art Association; The Cleveland Clinic; MetroHealth Medical Center; Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, Attorneys; and private individuals. Barbara is part of the studio collective Artists at the Twist in the Twist Drill Building. She was formerly the Executive Director at Broadway School of Music & the Arts.

ARTIST STATEMENT

For a long time my work has dealt with the interpenetration of form and language. I use the working process to discover what interests me most visually, and am guided by images that come to me intuitively and/or develop as I work. Much of my past work was inspired by the concept of the vessel as it relates to the female body, biomorphic forms, physical movement and ancient fertility figures, but I often used letterforms in a material, patterned way to lend denseness to my figures. Beginning in early 2017, I began to work on pages of a large type found book, and later over lines from Inauguration and State of the Union speeches I printed onto watercolor paper, regarding the lines of printed type as an armature of sorts. I used repeated infinity loops around single words or pairs of words, glazes of gouache, and interjection of organic forms and other shapes to blot words out, unravel them, and destroy their original meaning and context, while building something new. These drawings were a way of processing my grief at the lack of honesty, beauty, kindness and largesse of language in the public domain, as well as by the concomitant erosion of humanism. Being able to immerse myself in this fixed field (the 9” x 6” book page) to intimately explore its visual possibility also provided me with a temporary, tactile respite from the incessant media barrage of information and the press of social media. I have continued to play with these ideas in my most recent mixed media works on clayboard.