BIOGRAPHY
Brenda Giegerich paints vividly colored paintings, that are abstract, highly personal and visually engaging. Using a vocabulary of color, dashes and brushwork, she creates places that are beautiful, dream-like and powerfully emotional. In Giegerich's often bold images, viewers will encounter enchanted and strange, yet somehow familiar geographies.
Brenda Giegerich was born in 1949 in Kansas City, MO, and grew up in Westport, CT. As a child, she was deeply involved with art and shared her love of drawing and painting with her mother, who was an artist. Giegerich studied art at Lawrence University in Appleton, WI, where her work reflected her interest in figurative Expressionist painting. She had a particular appreciation for early Expressionist painters, influenced especially by artists like Munch and Nolde, and was attracted to the post-Impressionist use of color. Howard Hodgkin and Gerhard Richter were and continue to be sources of inspiration, the former for his use of vibrant color, and the latter for his fertile visual invention. The work of both painters can be seen in Giegerich's own sense of abstraction, in which she deploys large colored forms to create her painted landscapes.
After graduating college, Giegerich lived and painted in San Francisco, then moved to Boston where she studied at Lesley University, receiving a Masters in Education in 1975. Seven years later, she moved to New Mexico where she revisited her love of representational painting in still lifes, landscapes and figures, all of which remained faithful in their emphasis on color. In the mid 80s, Giegerich began painting very large abstract canvases, noting painters such as de Kooning and Kline as inspiration, and showcasing her work widely throughout the later years. In 1986, she studied with Helen Frankenthaler, whose presence can be felt in Giegerich's painted fields, intuitively created by pouring thinned-down pigment, layering transparent color and scraping away paint to reveal a new surface of color and texture. During this time, Giegerich also began making monoprints, studying with Garner Tullis in 1992. Printmaking, because of its use of layering, has influenced the direct physical processes that are central to Giegerich's current paintings.
In 1996 Giegerich moved back to Westport, CT, where she currently lives and works. She has shown her work both nationally and internationally, is a former member of The Center For Contemporary Printmaking, and is represented by BCB Gallery in Hudson, New York.