Lineamenta Arborum The Features of Trees Bark prints are clearly central to Birgitta Volz's current works of art. Her works inspire the oldest graphical printing- technique, the woodprint, with new life. Birgitta Volz has always been fascinated by the versatile forms and structures of nature. Since wood attracted her most strongly, she chose it as her material and, later on, as the focus of her work. The artistic language of her woodcuts had become more abstract and primitive, until she reduced herself more and more to the colour and form of nature, reluctantly if ever changing the natural form of those of her printing-blocks which she regards as perfect. As a logical consequence she has begun to work with the most natural form of wood, the tree itself, looking for ways to artistically express and visualize the very nature of the trees. Thanks to her experience with uneven and three- dimensional printing blocks, she succeeded in developing her own technique for printing trees alive, the bark print. Using expressive bark-prints, Birgitta Volz leads the observer into a world almost forgotten by our materialistic society, a world of structure and shapes, for which we can hardly find words - not least, because these forms take a feature and form for a moment, only to escape the eye of the startled spectator in the next. Matthias Behrend

Art - Man - Nature   In an age, in which technique forces man into a daily scheme foreign to his dispositon, an artist has to stand up for his or her beliefs. Working with a particular technique quite often results in brilliant trans- positions with artistic meaning left an empty shell. Birgitta Volz with her bark-prints has chosen a quite different path. The technique she has developed, colouring the barks of trees and directly imprinting their grown structure, provides the basis for her direct approach to the printing block as well as to the finished picture. Color and eye are her most important tools. Consequently her pictures communicate directness, yet give away a vulnerability. Her principle of choice and combination - quite different from the woodcut-technique of change and manipulation - opens fresh insights for the observer into familiar and esteemed patterns. This kind of depiction endows the printed medium, the bark, with an entirely new character. For Birgitta Volz the printing block, after a short intermezzo as the leading actor in an art production, returns to being what it was before, namely a tree. The knowledge of art, man and nature transported by Birgitta Volz in her bark- prints leaves an impression on the spectator. In circumscribing the impression of nature, the word "beauty" quite often comes to mind. This word is the simplest description for the works of the artist Birgitta Volz. Helmut Schuster