Ritzi Jacobi, a European pioneer of contemporary textiles and fiber art, best known for his monumental wall hangings and soft sculptures, died on June 19th at his home in Düsseldorf, Germany. She was 80 years old.
The death was confirmed by her husband, Heinz Posat, who did not identify the cause.
Jacobi’s vast textile work was made from a variety of fiber-based materials, from cotton to goat hair. Her work is somewhat similar to traditional tapestries, but it has pushed shape into the abstract realm of modernism.
She “had a great influence on the fields of crafts and arts,” said Jane Milosh, a former contemporary crafts curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Warren Sirig, Professor Emeritus University of the Arts In Philadelphia, where she organized an exhibition of her work in 1994, Jacobi was often referred to as a “fiber artist,” but said her work was not easily categorized.
“She was probably one of the very early, truly interdisciplinary artists, mixing all sorts of things,” he said. “She wasn’t a myopia weaver. She worked extensively on paper, metal, cloth, textiles and goat hair — all that. After all, what’s really provocative and innovative is her tapestry. was.”
Victoria Areclia Gavrila was born on August 12, 1941 in Bucharest, Romania, to Nicolae and Marieta Gavrila. Her father worked on the railroad and her mother was a housewife. (She is called Ritzi and is an abbreviation for Victoria, Victoria’s Diminutive in Lumania.)
Her early childhood was characterized by the turmoil and poverty of World War II, said Milosh, who conducted a five-hour interview with Jacobi for the Smithsonian. Oral history project In 2010.
“She didn’t have traditional toys and no teddy bears,” Milosh wrote in an email. Instead, “she was intrigued by’playing’with her clothes, disassembling them early on and starting to study inside out. Therefore, in a sense, she was the earliest to enter the textile business. “
Ritzy grew up in the capital Bucharest, but often visited relatives in the countryside, where he began experimenting with natural materials.
She was encouraged by her parents to explore her newborn creativity and was good at painting between elementary and high school students.She was accepted by Institutulde Arte Plastice in Bucharest and is now National University of Arts in BucharestStudy applied arts.
Ritzy arrived there in 1961 and soon met Peter Jacobi, a four-year-old senior sculpture student. “She was in her first year and I was in her sixth year, so we spent a year together,” Jacobi said in an interview. “That year we became a couple.”
The year after graduation, Jacobi said he had found employment in the Romanian city of Craiova, where traditional Turkish weavers made rugs and kilims from goat hair since the Ottoman Empire.
Goat hair was one of the materials they chose when the couple began collaborating on artwork. They got married in 1966.
Romania became a communist country in 1947, and Jacobi’s grade coincided with the rise of the country’s dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1968, becoming a totalitarian state.
“It wasn’t an easy time for the artist,” Jacovi’s German art dealer Volker Deal said in an interview. Jacobis chose to work with fibers and fibers, at least in part, he said. “The art censor did not take this kind of work seriously, so he was able to work without censorship or pressure.”
Their work fits into the long traditional Romanian weave, which has produced lush and colorful tapestries and carpets. But while they borrow from this heritage, Jacobis is like a relief of sculpture, while retaining the natural shades of materials such as cotton, untreated paperboard, sandpaper, sisal linen, coir and graphite. I woven it.
American Craft magazine acknowledged Jacobis for introducing goat hair into contemporary textile art. And art historians recognize their work as part of the “new tapestry” movement, with traditional crafts such as Magdalena Abakanowic in Poland, Jagodabuitch in Croatia, Lenoa Tony, Claire Seisler and Sheila Hicks in the United States. Promoted by a group of artists working on it.
“Their work really fits into the phenomenon of that moment in 1968, when all these forms of art were booming,” Milosh said. “But they were very specific as a very monumental tapestry. They would be wondering because their work was so big, and they were also very organic architecture. So I will swallow you. “
In 1969, Jacobis exhibited at the International Tapestry Biennale in Lausanne, Switzerland. A year later, they were invited to represent Romania at the Venice Biennale.
The couple went into exile in Germany after receiving a special visa to leave Romania to attend the art fair. “Like many other artists and writers, they made that choice, but it was a difficult choice because it meant separating yourself from your family,” Milosh said. I did.
Jacobis has been working closely with us for nearly 20 years. Mr. Deal said that people often assumed that Jacobi was the creativity of the couple, but in reality it was often the opposite.
Their first major solo exhibition in the United States was held at the Detroit Institute of Arts. After that, I moved to several other venues, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The creative partnership between marriage and couple ended in 1984, and in the same year they held exhibitions at the Paris Museum of Modern Art and the National Museum of Modern Art in the French city of Beauvais.
Since then, Jacobi has been active as a solo artist.
“She was prosperous,” Milosh said. “We were pushing many of the works they created together in yet another direction,” she said.
In 1994, Mr. Jacobi Solo exhibition“The Impulse to Abstract: Recent Work by Ritzi Jacobi” sponsored by Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Philadelphia University of the Arts.
Professor Seelig, who curated the exhibition, recalled that “she was virtually blind” at the time.
“She wore a coke bottle lens. She wasn’t very verbal, but she was making these huge pieces, so she needed a lot of concentration.”
He explained that Jacobi’s work process was “thinking through tactile and tactile sensations.”
“Her surface erupted almost naturally, blisters and looked very natural, due to the way she played with tension and pressure,” said Professor Seelig. “It came from the idea that she was doing it when her hands were touching the material.”
Her last gallery exhibition, “The edge of darknessWas held at the Diehl Gallery in Berlin in 2019.
In addition to Mr. Posat, Mr. Jacobi has survived by her brother, Florian Gabrilla.
