Warja Lavater's activity as a freelance artist began after an extended stay in New York from 1958 to 1960. The impressions from the pulsating metropolis, the highways, Times Square with its neon signs and jazz venues, as well as the newly forged friendships with artists such as Sam Francis, Al Held, George Sugarman and Sandy Calder moved Lavater to say goodbye to the role of the tradition-conscious graphic designer and illustrator. She discovered the sign language of street signals and the Asian folding book as a medium of expression. In China Town, she observed calligraphers painting traditional paintings in folding books. From this time, she also made drawings and gouaches in which she recorded her impressions.
Artists' books
Even before the term artist's book had become established, Warja Lavater defined the book as an artistic field of experimentation for herself. She did not stick to the small format, but enlarged her fanfold books into independent sculptures. Starting in the 1970s, she began to form small and larger paper sculptures out of handmade paper, so-called Paper Art.
She called her Artists' books Folded Stories, Pictosonies, Sing-Song-Sings, and Imageries. Underlying these works is the idea that abstract pictorial elements can visually tell stories. The artist chose the Leporello as her medium. With its extendable and foldable pages, the Leporello is able to capture the mobility and the temporal course of a narrative as if on a film strip. The symbols, which are repeated in ever new constellations, are explained in a legend, so that the abstract images can be deciphered by means of the explanation of the signs, as with a map.
