Sylvia Witzenmann – an artist and craftswoman

The experience gained from working with small details in goldsmithing is beneficial for large-scale painting. Experience gained from large-scale painting, in turn, has a stimulating effect on concentrated goldsmithing. Like a lemniscate, the flow of creative energy is endless.

Sylvia Witzenmann was born in Munich in 1941 and grew up in Pforzheim. In 1968, she earned an MBA degree in Fontainebleau and then returned to Germany to work in industry as a PR manager. In the early 1970s, she realized that this was not her path in life and made a pact with herself to become an artist.

Sylvia Witzenmann enrolled as an art student at the University of Applied Sciences in Pforzheim, where she studied painting, printmaking, enameling, batik, and sculpture.

In 1974, she came to New York and perfected her training in goldsmithing and enameling with Robert Kulicke and Jean Reist Stark, two masters who were also well versed in the fine

It was then that she found her first profession—goldsmithing. In the process, she also acquired skills that would later become essential to her work in painting. Techniques she used as a goldsmith were later transferred to another medium and integrated into her painting process. This unity of artistic disciplines is directly related to Witzenmann's philosophy: 

She describes herself as an artist-craftswoman.  She insists on first mastering her medium and then being able to express her artistic creativity alongside her technique. 

Witzenmann's pursuit of strict control in the construction of her paintings is directly based on the precision and attention required by goldsmithing. She spent many years training her hand and her eyes by developing the techniques of repoussé, granulation, and enameling, and also studied the three-dimensional construction of forms in metal with the Italian artist Bruno Martinazzi.

For over 20 years, Sylvia Witzenmann maintained a studio in New York's Diamond District, as well as a painting studio in Hells Kitchen. Witzenmann pursues the classic ideal of a goldsmith, combining different techniques in a single piece of jewelry. Her preferred materials are gold in all alloys, as well as platinum, white gold, and silver. She integrates precious gemstones in a wide variety of cuts, as well as pavé-set diamonds and colored stones, into her designs. She always attaches great importance to collaboration between designer and customer in order to express the individual personality of the wearer in the jewelry. A piece of jewelry should pay tribute to the character of the stone and at the same time reflect the harmonious lines of the human body. Influences from all these techniques can be found in many of her large-format paintings, which are built up layer by layer of paint, often impasto, on the canvas to create a sense of substance and represent the real and fictional worlds. Sylvia Witzenmann expresses both human experience and reality in her works.

Sylvia Witzenmann purchased a small house in East Hampton, where she had been spending her summers since 1983. Here in Springs, on Gerard Drive (where Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning had previously worked), she was fascinated by the coastal landscapes, the water, and the changing light conditions.

Soon, alongside the more mimetic daytime landscapes seen en plein air, night landscapes began to emerge during the night hours in her studio. This liberating process led from an impressionistic observation-oriented reproduction of what she saw to an inner translation into expressive images. These night paintings differ greatly from the daytime views; the colors are darker, more mysterious, the brushstrokes more vehement and furious. She is no longer concerned with similarity to reality, but with conveying a certain mood that the landscape evokes in her. She thus developed her style toward abstract landscapes while retaining clear references to the foreground, background, or multiple horizon lines. The viewer can recognize natural forms such as bodies of water, mountains, caves, or the sky. However, it is also obvious that these landscapes depict an introspection that Witzenmann discovered within herself or in myth.

There are a number of works in her oeuvre that commemorate lost lives:

the fateful TWA Flight 800, which crashed over Long Island Sound in 1996, and the large-scale triptych “TWO SUNS WEEPING,” commemorating the events of September 11, 2010. After her experiences with landscape, Witzenmann began to depict figures in order to explore the human body. Similar to her abstract works, these paintings are gestural and expressive. A certain otherworldliness in her figures can be attributed to the artist's practice of developing her forms from memory rather than basing them on models or photographs. As in all her works, color is the starting point from which the figure or other pictorial objects are constructed. A latent threat is evident in many of Sylvia Witzenmann's depictions of figures. She has expressed her demand for humanity and compassion in paintings such as KIDNAPPED, ABU GHRAIB, and ITS THE MAPS MAN. Behind this lies the realization that humanity is fundamentally affected by questions of war and peace.

Witzenmann's art explores many current technical, philosophical, and spiritual issues. Her work is influenced by a variety of factors. These include her upbringing and comprehensive humanistic education in Germany, inspiration from her experiences of German landscapes, and her reception of German Romanticism and Expressionism. Her distinctive gestural style draws more on the American heritage of abstract expressionism. 

Numerous works on paper, travel sketches, large-format linocuts, and expressive chalk drawings were the focus of two solo exhibitions in Pforzheim in 2019. Witzenmann's background as a goldsmith, her travels around the world, and her universal interest in science, politics, and culture also shape her artistic work.

Above all, however, it is her intention to capture universal human experiences and an awareness of her own present. 

The timeless themes of her images, which address fundamental questions of humanity and our time, lend Sylvia Witzenmann's works a high degree of relevance.