Christine Mauersberger
About the artist:
A lifelong resident of Cleveland, Christine Mauersberger earned a B.A. in Studio Art from Cleveland State University (she cites as one influence printmaker Marvin Jones, (also represented in the Summa Collection) and did post-graduate studies in graphic design. She has always made art and been involved with art collections, but she turned to artmaking full-time only relatively recently. Beginning with small-scale mark-making that derived from the hand stitching she had learned from her mother, Mauersberger has taken an intuitive path to discovering materials and techniques that corresponded to her sense of why she makes art. Almost immediately she found that she also wanted to work on a large scale, in space, and so found her way to creating works -- her "complex mark-making narratives" -- in public spaces as well as in empty houses in Slavic Village.
She has had numerous solo exhibitions and group shows throughout Ohio, in Nebraska, Michigan, and New York, as well as in Ontario, Quebec, and Portadown, Ireland. She was the Rockwell Visiting Artist at the Taft School in Watertown, CT, and has taught in Lugano, Switzerland; Vancouver, British Columbia; Florida, New York, Maine, Michigan, and Ohio. Each fall she teaches at the Pacific Northwest Art School in Coupeville, WA. She has twice won Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, as well as a Cuyahoga County Creative Workforce Fellowship and a Windgate Craft Artists Fellowship to spend time at the Vermont Studio Center.
Where you can find more works by this artist:
Christine Mauersberger has created aerial sculptures which you can see in Tremont, Cuyahoga Community College's STEM building in Parma, in East End in Akron, and at the Moxy Hotel in Columbus. A mural, which she describes as "bespoke wallpaper", incorporates historical themes on entrance walls of the Grant, a renovated apartment building in downtown Cleveland.
In addition to these large-scale works, all well documented on her website, she continues to create on a more intimate scale, on paper and frequently incorporating hand stitching. Her work is reproduced in multiple books on textiles and textile art, and she is represented by HEDGE Gallery in Cleveland.
Where you can find more works like these:
You will find a number of works of art at Summa in which artists work in gridded format, often for wildly contrasting reasons and with totally different results. See, for example the work of Nichole Condon-Shih, that of Andrew Reach, or of Christopher Felver.
Dream Cloud Series
Dream Cloud series, 1, 2, and 3, 2022
Materials and dimensions: alcohol ink wash on Yupo paper with screen print overlay each 20” x 24"
Location at Summa: Barberton Internal Medicine waiting room.
About the art:
Christine Mauersberger sets out to solve problems and along the way discovers or develops new techniques. Here she uses a synthetic paper, Yupo, that permits her to create washes with alcohol ink. That ink is made of a natural color suspended in rubbing alcohol and, on the Yupo, flows easily and does not fade, a quality highly valued by artists.
On top of this complex ground in each, the artist has overlaid selected images of clouds which she first drew in a digital illustration program and then transferred to a silkscreen. Silkscreen or serigraph printing is a sophisticated stenciling technique first developed in the Far East almost two thousand years ago. So, these three works on paper represent both ancient and really new tools and materials.
You need know nothing about these technical/process details to feel transported by the light and airy clouds in this series, although each composition includes in the mix at least one darker, perhaps more ominous cloud. Christine Mauersberger thinks of "Cleveland clouds," witnessed over the years lakeside, almost like old friends. Yet an awareness of her very deliberate choices and multi-step processes does alert us to the subtle layers in which these clouds travel across the picture plane, as well as to the almost vanishing colors of their skies. We may look at the skies outside a little differently as a result.
Where you can find more works like these:Discover clouds in some works by these artists in the Summa Collection: Caroline Rowntree, Gloria Plevin, Ibojka Maria Friedman, and Michael Greenwald
Sea Glass Dots
Work title, date: Sea Glass Rocks, Sea Glass Dots 2022
Materials and dimensions: watercolor on paper each 22" x 30"
Location at Summa: Barberton Internal Medicine waiting room.
About the art:
As gridded presentations of pieces of sea glass -- that ephemeral product of drowned glass rolled over, under, around and through the waves of oceans and lakes -- both of these works call our attention to the varied forms and colors that result from these natural processes, as well as impressing us with their number.
In Sea Glass Rocks, at left, Christine Mauersberger gives us a rich experience of what might feel like the infinite variety of colors, sizes, and shapes in which sea glass washes up onto our shores, delightful gifts from nature. Inspired by some pieces which she has collected near her home, she has also invented some shapes and plays with color to achieve verisimilitude without slavish realism. The grid suggests a precious collection, as in the venerable tradition of cabinets of curiosities, as well as an effort to delimit that which may be conceptually infinite.
In Sea Glass Dots, she further expands our sense of the infinite by concentrating just on color, presented in almost identical daubs that don't distract by grand variations, so this grid seems even more controlled than that in Sea Glass Rocks. The blues and greens she captures range widely, from intense to almost white, always originating in the color of water which itself also reflects light waves from the skies overhead. The grid here imposes meditative repetition, almost an incantation, and Mauersberger reminds us that her artmaking has always depended on mindfulness and on making the invisible visible. This study in color may well offer an opening into her own interior landscape.
Where you can find more works like these:
You will find a number of works of art at Summa in which artists work in gridded format, often for wildly contrasting reasons and with totally different results. See, for example the work of Nichole Condon-Shih, that of Andrew Reach, or of Christopher Felver