Barbara Edelstein
Shanghai, China
About the Artist
Barbara Edelstein is an internationally-known artist with exhibits worldwide, including recent shows in China, the United States, and Europe. She holds a MFA from Claremont Graduate University and a B.A. from the University of California Santa Cruz. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Art at NYU Shanghai.
Edelstein has several large-scale permanent public artworks around the globe, including sculptures for the Shanghai Jing’An International Sculpture Park, Guangdong Museum of Art, and the Hangzhou Municipal Government. Her catalogs include “Flowing Leaf Floating Water,” “Leaf in the Air,” as well as many other museum and gallery catalogs, and art publications. Edelstein has received a number of international grants, fellowships, and residencies. Having a western perspective on art and currently working in China has given her a unique viewpoint to combine both the cultures of the East and West into her art, and develop her multi-media artworks.
Gloria Orenstein on Barbara Edelstein’s artworks:
“It’s like nature writing a poem to the viewer in its own language.”
“…[in] the gentle dance of branch shadows swaying to the rhythm of the breeze in her film, “With Breeze: Shadows,” we suddenly realize that we are not only perceiving the tree and the leaves in their material solidity, but we are also seeing their anima, the invisible dimension of the life-force that flows through everything. As we focus on the effects of movements in nature made by the energy-charged space of the Air, we realize that we are communing with this vital life force, an ethereal dimension that is usually invisible to us... Barbara Edelstein’s vision makes us aware of the ineffable and subtle resonances that are ordinarily ‘out of sight’…As we become aware of the balance of opposites, the yin and the yang, the solid and the spaces, the black and the white, aware of flowing with nature and not controlling nature, we may yet have time to turn the tide and restore life on our planet. In Barbara Edelstein’s art, Air and space have become sites where the energies of the dance and the music of life are perceptible to humans.”
