Jacqueline Schreier: from Illustration to Visual Freedom
By And-Art Works Magazine
The career of Jacqueline Schreier (Lausanne, Switzerland, 1936) is a singular example of how the discipline of illustration and design can transcend its boundaries to become a visual language of richness and freedom. Her current work, presented in the And-Art Works collection, is a sensitive cartography where painting, collage, sculpture, and textile practices converge, always infused with humor, fantasy, and material experimentation.
Educated at the School of Fine Arts in Zürich and with an extensive international career in advertising, animation, and illustration in countries such as Canada, Italy, Norway, Venezuela, and Spain, Schreier has absorbed each cultural context and transformed it into a unique visual poetics. For more than four decades she has lived in the Sierra of Madrid, a natural environment that has become a constant source of inspiration for her artistic worlds.
Matter as a Territory of Exploration
Her artistic research encompasses a wide range of media. She works with anilines on silk and paper, achieving transparencies and color nuances of an almost liquid delicacy.
On canvas and wood, she masters acrylic, transforming it into an explosion of pigment, rhythm, and texture. To these practices she adds elements such as wooden rods, brass plates, or gold leaf—resources that turn the surface into a hybrid territory. These incorporations transform her creations into mixed-media pieces, where the boundary between painting and object dissolves.
Schreier does not limit herself to conventional languages: she has explored weaving and loom work, using wool and raw or organic materials to shape abstract compositions. These textile pieces become a natural extension of her interest in color, matter, and the sensory, generating a dialogue between the ancestral and the contemporary.
In the sculptural field, she combines cold ceramics, high-temperature ceramics, metal, wood, and other materials, always with a playful touch. One of the defining aspects of her work is the sense of humor that permeates both her sculptures and her paintings. This humor is a direct legacy of her career as an illustrator and her fascination with fairy tales, magical worlds, and the innocence of childhood.
Humor and Innocence as Poetics
In her creations, the viewer encounters landscapes filled with natural elements that seem to come alive: the sun, the moon, the jungle, water, the forest, animals, and the inhabitants of those fantastic universes wander and fly, building scenes that shift between dream and reality. The result is an art that connects with both playfulness and essence, with the capacity for wonder that brings us back to imagination.
Critics have highlighted in her work a form of naïve and colorful expressionism, capable of recovering childlike innocence and bringing it into the field of contemporary painting. Her compositions are structured universes where fantasy becomes a tool of balance, almost meditative, connecting with what is most essential in the aesthetic experience: the need to immerse oneself in color and form to rediscover what is primal and vital.
Between Figuration and Abstraction
In her early stages, figuration marked the rhythm of her work, with clear resonances of Paul Klee and Henri Rousseau.
However, her evolution has led toward a growing tendency for lyrical abstraction, where color, texture, and form acquire full autonomy. This transition does not represent a rupture but an expansion of her language, a natural movement in the evolution of an artist who understands creation as a process in constant transformation.
Recognition and Relevance
The work of Jacqueline Schreier has been exhibited in institutions and galleries in both Spain and Switzerland, including the prestigious Gallery of the Cantonal Bank of Zürich. In 1991, her participation in the celebrations of the 700th anniversary of Switzerland, invited by the Swiss Embassy in Spain, confirmed the importance of her production within an international context.
Today, she continues to develop artistic projects with the same vitality, combining editorial illustration with painting, sculpture, and collage. Her presence in And-Art Works offers an opportunity to engage with a creator who has transformed decades of experience into a contemporary body of work that is both intimate and universal.
In Summary
Jacqueline Schreier does not simply produce artworks: she constructs worlds. Worlds where color intertwines with matter, where humor coexists with spirituality, and where nature becomes the stage for dreams and memories. Her work is an invitation to explore a visual space that defies categories and reminds us that art, at its core, remains a celebration of imagination and life.
