Bowman Gallery

Born and raised in Paris, artist Brigitte Engler has called the Lower East Side her home since she first moved to New York City in 1980 to study at the Whitney Independent Study Program after studying at the Beaux-Arts school of Paris.

Since the early eighties, she has been part of the downtown art world, working as an artist and art reporter for PAPER magazine. Her work has been exhibited in “Anniotanta,” a museum show curated by Corrado Levi, in galleries including “City Folks” curated by Carlo McCormick and Aaron Rose at the Holly Solomon Gallery; “Burning in Hell” curated by Nancy Spero at Franklin Furnace; “In the Detail” curated by Kiki Smith at Barbara Gross Gallery (Munich, Germany); “Nincompatible” (with Richard Hell and Walter Robinson) at the Bowman Bloom Gallery in NYC and in one-person shows in Paris at Gordon Pam&fils, Brittany and Downtown LA at PØST in the context of ‘Ceci nest pas…” and at Commonwealthandcouncil. Several artist projects have been published in collaboration with editors of Semiotext(e) Sylvère Lotringer and Chris Kraus. Engler’s work is represented in a new publication from Printed Matter edited by Max Schumann, “A Book About Colab (and related activities).”

For the last three decades, Engler has been refining an art practice that is involved with the repetition and manipulation of pattern and focuses on the experience of the process to re-present ephemeral or anonymous patterns of everyday life (cropped newspaper illustrations, geometric patterns, sidewalk graffiti, woodgrain patterns, commercial designs) using archaic modes of reproduction such as embroidery, linocut printing, rubbing, tracing. In Lotringer’s words: Brigitte Engler’s practice “opposes to the abstraction of thought the physicality of Here and Now.”

Her future projects include “The Baroque Fold” a one person show in collaboration with an ecological research collective with an installation of a submerged fabric art piece in a medieval tide mill in Brittany in May 2016, an upcoming show “Unique Multiples” at Max Fish in March in NYC, a group show with Commonwealthandcouncil in Los Angeles.