Dresses and pictures that all tell personal stories

Created: 05/12/2022Updated: 05/12/2022 13:44

By: Joerg Domke

Erika Prabst with four very unusual pieces of clothing that are everything but not made of fabric © Stefan Rossmann

Art objects can tell entire stories.

Also reveal a lot of personal things from the artists.

Erika Prabst has woven a lot of private things into 70 works that have been created in the last three years.

And processed unusual material.

Glonn – expressing feelings, sharing memories, processing special experiences: all of this quite often resonates in art.

The big players hardly differ from the players in the district, for example;

or not.

In the last three years, Erika Prabst has incorporated a lot, no, a lot of personal things into around 70 works that have been created since the first lockdown.

"Because of the pandemic, time really wasn't the problem," says the 78-year-old in the run-up to an exhibition that she will be showing on Saturday and Sunday, May 14th and 15th, and the weekend after that, on May 21st and 22nd . May, in the gallery monastery school in Glonn will contest all alone.

These are exclusively works that were created during this Corona phase.

The title of the exhibition is: "With my eyes".

A dress made of tape material: A special memento

Basically, it is an exhibition with three themes.

The most unusual are probably four works that could be assigned to fashion in the broadest sense.

The clothes of my life, so they say.

However, the native of Murnau does not use conventional fabrics here, but rather atypical materials.

Materials that say a lot about the artist and her life.

For example, old, brown and black audio tapes and chrome dioxide tapes from old music cassettes, which Erika Probst's niece in the USA, herself an artist, was able to make available to her in large quantities.

The ladies came up with the idea of ​​using this material, mostly personal audio recordings, to make a turn-of-the-century dress out of it.

At first it was still unclear whether this could work at all, says the Grafingerin.

With a lot of time, patience and skill, however, something was created that is already a souvenir for Erika Prabst, which at the same time tells a lot of family history.

It would always be portable.

But because there is so much personal content in the work, it will remain purely an art object.

Also, by the way, a second dress that can be admired for the first time in Glonn tomorrow.

It essentially consists of colorfully painted, labeled scraps of paper.

First of all, Erika Prabst wrote down the names of people on paper who meant something to her in the course of her life: friends, schoolmates, artist colleagues, relatives.

A few hundred anyway.

These slips of paper were cut up again and sewn together again to form a so-called sheath dress.

And thus to a piece of clothing that also tells a lot about the artist in a completely different way.

Homage to three great artists

The same applies to a corset that consists exclusively of trimmed blisters.

Blister packs of pills that accumulated in heaps due to one's own protracted illness and were now gradually being assembled into a dress that could only be looked at and admired, but not actually worn.

"The dream is over" is what the artist called it meaningfully.

There is a delicate hint of what we might call impermanence.

Object No. 4 is flower dress;

and it connects to the second great passion of artists;

the gardening.

Joined together to form an upper part, there are countless, by the way, real blossoms here.

Although they were processed a year ago, they have not lost their typical scent to this day.

And to answer the question of whether it could theoretically be worn: Yes, but according to the creator it would be very fragile.

Exhibition in Glonn consists of three subject areas

The second part of the exhibition - entitled "My Perspective" - ​​is about a very personal homage to the world-famous artists Klimt, Klee and Matisse.

The Grafingerin, who has been dealing with painting since 1987 and later also with paper objects and reverse glass painting, has approached them in very different ways.

Sometimes in the form of a collage that deals with Klimt's typical ornamentation.

Sometimes with motifs from well-known works that Erika Prabst knitted with a great deal of time.

Definitely a form of Sisyphean labor, because: "One stitch too many can mean that a face, for example, looks disfigured again".

Incidentally, Erika Prabst gained experience in this area of ​​approaching works of art by knitting years ago;

when she made knitted portraits of Mandela or Obama, for example.

Part three was simply called “My Garden”.

It's about motifs from her own garden, which inevitably was a main source of inspiration for a good three years – probably not only for Erika Prabst (www.prabst.de).

The exhibition "With my eyes" can be seen on the following days in the Glonn monastery school: May 14: 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.;

May 15: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.;

May 21: 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.;

May 22: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

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