Barbara Kuebel 'Water Is My Life!' Print Available

Artist: Barbara Kuebel
Title: Water Is My Life!
Medium: Woodcut Print
Size: 24 x 33.9 Inches
Edition: 10
Price: $650

Barbara Kuebel was born in 1969 in Linz, Austria, and today lives and works in Daphne, Alabama. After earning two degrees from the Academy of Fine Art Vienna she moved from painting into large scale woodcut printing, an approach that allows her to carve life sized figures directly into raw timber without costly chemicals or elaborate tools . Her creative process is guided by a studio mantra of “no fun, no art,” a principle that keeps the work spontaneous and physically engaging.

Kuebel’s images spring from awkward social moments and the never ending search for being. She begins with swift charcoal sketches of bodies in motion, then translates those fluid lines into hefty woodblocks. Using only hand gouges and basic rollers, she cuts away negative space for about a week, prints the block in three concentrated hours, and allows the sheet to dry for two weeks, producing editions of five that bear rough hewn edges and velvety monochrome ink.

The finished portraits feel simultaneously abstract and figurative: limbs stretch and overlap, expressions remain unfinished, and the grain of the wood becomes a living element within the picture plane.

Exhibitions in Europe and the United States have presented these prints alongside painted variations that echo the same emotive energy in oil and pencil . Whether showing a single towering figure or a dense swarm of characters, Kuebel invites viewers to confront the uneasy beauty of human connection and the raw physicality of mark making itself.