Swiss in the City

"In German, there’s this wonderful saying, “Sag es durch die Blume” — “Say it through a flower”. The expression is used to convey the need to deliver difficult news softly, with elegance and great care. At some point during the pandemic, I picked up a bouquet of flowers from the farmer’s market. As I looked at those flowers, it struck me how their experience resembled ours. They were severed from their source, but still capable of blooming nonetheless. I felt extremely disoriented at the start of the pandemic and when #painting, I was stuck in a pictorial language from the past that didn’t speak of these new times. The flowers allowed me to access my present paint vocabulary as well as to explore and process the emotional landscape of the pandemic by saying it through the flower. The result is currently on view at Massey Klein Gallery in the Lower East Side.

I have been painting and taking #art classes since I was a child. I am a dual Citizen, which allowed me to go to an American art high school outside of Boston when I was 16. I’ve never been much of a big city person and loved Switzerland’s nature. While looking at colleges in New York my parents and I visited Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and my dad said: “Look this place has a campus with big trees, nature…This is good for Chrissy!”. So I continued my artistic career and studied at Pratt with its green campus.

I still miss Switzerland a lot, but one good thing that came out of the pandemic is that in my 20 years of living here I’ve never felt so deeply connected and at home in New York as I do right now." - Chrissy Angliker

#SwissInTheCity #Artist #AnglikerStudioNYC #impressionistic