UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School held a private reception to honor artist Jane Gottlieb, some of whose work now graces the walls of the Education Building, on Sunday, May 3. Welcoming the intimate crowd, Acting Dean Merith Cosden shared her love of the work and said, “We are so happy to be celebrating Jane Gottlieb’s art in our building. Jane graciously offered to put some of her favorite artworks on loan in our building – you can’t believe what a difference it makes. A year ago, the entrance to our building was blank and grey. Today it is bursting with color. People stop in the halls and look.”
In a review of the Education Building show, critic Charles Donelan of the Santa Barbara Independent called the show “impressive” and wrote, “Gottlieb’s signature style involves the modification of her original photographs through the addition of intense, hyper-saturated color. Think Andy Warhol meets Eugène Atget, or Robert Rauschenberg retouches Walker Evans. In this latest manifestation of her work, the stakes are higher, as Gottlieb has discovered a new process that allows her to print these images onto aluminum panels. The results are jewel-like in their incandescence….The overall impact of the exhibit is to enliven the unrelieved whiteness of the building’s freshly constructed walls and to suggest, by implication, that education requires both observation and fantasy.”
Ms. Gottlieb’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at many museums and is held in many public collections (including at UCLA, Brookings Institute, Carnegie Art Museum, Disney Art Collection). She has been written up in numerous art publications and major magazines.
Gottlieb began as a painter and evolved into a photographer, and then combined her two passions, turning to hand-painting on Cibachrome prints. “Now I scan my one-of-a-kind hand-painted prints, enhance them with Photoshop, and produce limited edition archival chromogenic prints,” she says on her website. For this exhibit, Gottlieb has printed her art on aluminum, a new and exciting archival digital medium. “Color is luscious to me. It’s a luxury to be able to fill my life with color. Color is energy; it evokes emotion and feelings, and it makes you feel good—it really does pick you up, and suddenly you are smiling.”