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Fern Valfer lives and works in Chicago. Her paintings are expressive and abstract. Valfer has the ability to use the language of abstraction and gestural mark-making to find the lost voices of her family. In Back to Barcelona Valfer depicts an imaginary trip to the city of Barcelona where her ancestors came from. She marks the space with horizontal lines of strong brush strokes, contrasting composition with intense colors. Valfer’s searing abstractions are potent reminders that the panorama of history is in reality the sum of individuals’ lives whose experiences leave palpable imprints on future generations. In her case, it is the actions of Valfer’s parents, forced to leave Germany in the 30’s to escape the Holocaust, and the loss of her grandparents to its horrors, that instigated her search for ancestral identity–an identity that has been shaped by tragedy, dislocation, strength, and, ultimately, survival.
Valfer graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and currently she is a professor of Columbia Collage Chicago. Her works are in many collections in the USA and abroad, most notably in the Open Museum in Jerusalem, Israel, and in the Oakton Community College Art Collection in the Chicago area. She is the recipient of many awards and honors, among them from the Ragdale Foundation Fellowship, the National Endowment for Arts Archives Project, the National Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and many others.

 

Back to Barcelona, 2005, oil on canvas, 40” x 50”	River Park, 2004, oil on canvas, 48”x36”	Turquoise Aftermath, 2004, oil on canvas, 48” x 36”
Rose, 2005, oil on canvas, 9” x 12”, Chain Link, 2005, oil on canvas, 9“ x 12 “	Honor and Risk, Diptych, 2005, mixed media on canvas, 30” x 48”