Back to The Beginning
Curator/Iris Mendel
artists:
Dana Lev Levnat, Amanda Mehl, Gustavo Sagorsky, Gabriella Klein, Hillel Roman
Galconda Contemporary, Tel Aviv
2013
Local Pulse
Curator/Orly Hoffman
Artists' House, Tel Aviv
2015

text: Iris Mendel
Gabriella Klein’s series of collages presents hybrid landscapes composed of an encounter between different places that have been taken out of their contexts. Klein, who usually works in the medium of painting, this time accedes to a new sculpture-like syntax consisting of various actions such as photographing, cutting, printing and pasting. The “sculptural” unpopulated landscapes hold a dialogue with Klein’s painting language and form a mixture of nature, urbanity and domesticity. Klein turns to the photographs of the 19th-century American photographer Carleton Watkins, which depict America’s virgin, monumental landscapes. Following Watkins’ footsteps and using parts of his photographs suggests a search for a kind of origin: both in terms of the birth of photography, of that magic of the beginning and the “first click”, and in terms of the power of the unspoilt open space. The nature views merge with photographs of a domestic bed sheet, a piece of cloth covering the façade of a renovated Tel Aviv building, and reproductions of sections from the artist’s paintings. Together they become an undefined place, a grafting of body and landscape, a “human nature” that connects different times and spaces.
Iris Mendel from exhibit Back to the Beginning at Galconda Contemporary