angelika schubert
Biography
Born in Vienna/Austria, Angelika Schubert was surrounded by beauty from the beginning. Beauty of the city, the opera, the ballet, the everyday ‘Viennese life’, with its coffee houses, artists, and endless conversation. While she didn’t know it at the beginning it was to imbued her with a flare for art, design and fashion that have shaped her life.
Her first attempt to paint was at the age of three. As a child growing up with family holidays spend in the company of the children of friends of her parents, they would amuse themselves in the attics, going through numerous old clothes, hats, shoes, fabrics, lace, jewelry, feathers discovered in old chests. The creativity of this playmaking left her with a big impulse for the imagined.
At the age of six she couldn’t stop creating, drawing and painting. At the age eight, art, dance, theater, fashion, form, beauty and style fascinated her. At ten she started her first “serious” fashion designs. She also had the sudden urge to become a play-write, at which she failed in badly. The visual was her world.
Around the age of fifteen she started not only to create but also to cut and sew her first dresses “in a very de-constructed, now modern way”, she says. At fourteen she convinced her parents, who didn’t perceive a career in fashion and art possible, to allow her to become a student in the very “highly” thought-after fashion Institute in Vienna, The Hetzendorf Palace built 1694.
Six years at the fashion institute contributed tremendously in all aspects to her career. She was surrounded by beauty and history, and voraciously absorbed all aspects of the curriculum. She learned to create costumes out of paper mache and was introduced to other unusual fabrics. She was taught to use anything and everything for creations, to use the mind, to fantasize and to be practical and not to be afraid to try new approaches. She had the luck of being with a small group of scholars, and was so much inspired by the fabulous teachers. At the age of 20 she graduated from “Hetzendorf”.
Out of school her very first income came as a freelance designer for various boutiques and she was hired to create artistic window displays for a major Vienna store. Through this she was even more drawn to design, art and architecture and by living in the center of Vienna, and drawing from the artistic life surrounding her, she became immersed in it all with a passion.
Her work as a freelance fashion designer for the Austrian fashion bureau put her amongst five famous Austrian artists to design a part of a fashion show for the” Vorarlberger Stickerei Verband”. A season later she was designing the entire collection for the “Stickerei Verband”. This entailed 120 to 150 designs for each show as it traveled from Europe to the United States and Asia. At the same time she worked with a music director and a photographer in choreographing a “style and fashion” project for a modern art show that was held in a museum in Vienna. While involved in designing these shows, by pure coincidence, she started to model and this turn of events lead to a successful modeling career for many years. However, being involved in so many different but related fields of work, her urge to paint couldn’t be fulfilled.
As time went by she felt that she had exhausted the possibilities in Vienna and on a vacation to Mexico, made a stop in Los Angeles and spontaneously decided to move there.
Again, she started with her fashion designs. First freelance, but eventually deciding to form her own company. Collections were sold to Maxfields, Barney's, Wilkes Bashford and Macy’s in San Francisco. But when a point was reached that it became necessary to expand the business she opted out of such financial burden preferring to stay close to her creative soul so she chose to close business and moved onto a next venture.
Her success at modeling and the application of make-up, gave her the understanding of artistry in makeup and the effect lighting plays on it, and she was able combine this knowledge into becoming a make-up artist with a rare first hand experience of the camera. As many times in her life, a mix of luck and hard work, being at the right place at the right time, she became a very successful, working with photographers like Annie Leibowitz, Peggy Sirota, Herb Ritts, Matthew Rolston, Phillip Dixon to name a few. At one point she was so involved with the photography that she was hired to shoot a beauty and a fashion story for two different magazines.
However she missed the independence of owing a business so in 1985 she decided again to start a new venture. She opened CELESTINE, a hair, makeup and styling agency in Los Angeles. It soon became one of the top agencies in a highly competitive field and in 1993 she expanded Celestine to Seattle.
As the agencies established themselves, Angelika decided to invest in her good friend Dana Hollister. Together they opened a decorator, furniture, antique and pillow shop in Los Angeles called “ Odalisque. She was intrigued by finds in flea markets and auction houses in the states and in foreign cities. Fabrics, tapestry, chandeliers, carpets, and much more came their way, and the joy of design creation again became a focus.
At this time Angelika got very involved together with her husband, David Tate (a commercials producer), decorating their new house in Los Angeles. Together they designed and re-built a house in Lake Arrowhead that became a country home. Both designs were featured in Los Angeles Magazine and the LA house was shown on the “style” channel. She got more and more involved with architecture and design to the point that which she is currently in the midst of building, from scratch, a new house in Los Angeles, designed entirely by both of them.
In 1998 she decided to open Celestine in New York and with this thought in mind her life had changed in an instance.
“I came to NY to open the new company and never left this city again, except for some occasional short visits to LA to look after Celestine there. I learned that a even a well established LA-based agency will not survive the tough NY City requirements of being ‘new and hot’ and this brought me to the decision to re-open the doors with a new name, a new image and a new philosophy,” Angelika said.
ART HOUSE MANAGEMENT was formed and it became a ‘boutique’ agency representing photographers, fashion stylist, set-designers, prop stylist, makeup artists and hair stylists and it’s name allowed Angelika to be open to other ventures as she describes below.
“My NY lifestyle was very different to my LA lifestyle. With many weekends alone in the city, I decided, one Sunday morning, to buy myself a canvas and to start what I always wanted to do the most, to paint. This was the beginning of my ‘new painters’ career. I started spending every weekend in my loft painting, not only days but most of the nights as well. Finally all the years of being restrained from my true love towards paintings was lifted. When not only my friends but also all sorts of people liked my art this served to inspire me even more. When I sold my first painting I was in ecstasy.
Using my interest and ability in photography, I am currently looking for subjects and designing shots that later can become the abstract basis for a new series of paintings. I am fascinated by exploring parts of scenes. When isolated from their normal environment they metamorphose into shapes and forms of their own being.”
Through her continuous urge to ‘create’, in 2000, she started to paint with her friend Xavier Sequier. They worked together and simultaneously, on one canvas. Ultimately, fourteen paintings were produced for the first gallery showing at City Art in Soho in November 2002, followed by second show at Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts in 2004. Soon after Xavier moved back to Paris and Angelika concentrated seriously on her own paintings. She has been exhibited and sold at Alina Matsika in Soho for the past year.
“At this point in my life I am reevaluating my beliefs, passions and needs. While still looking after my three companies I feel that I can manage a freer schedule and have I decided to go after my very first initial urge to be a painter.”
