SHIFTS Solo Exhibition, Minshar Gallery, Tel Aviv 2013. Curator: Elad Kopler.
LAND SCOPE Solo Exhibition, Java Studios Gallery, NY, 2013
LAND SCOPE Solo Exhibition, Java Studios Gallery, NY, 2013
The Anatomy of Landscape
by Hadas Gilad
Land Scope / press release
"When you bounce a ball on a shifting ground, it doesn’t return to your hand." / Richard Serra
In her new exhibition, Land Scope, Israeli artist Michal Geva presents a new series of paintings created recently in New York City. Geva returns in these works to the implied landscapes of urban nature with concrete surfaces rising up above or instead of a shifting ground.
In Geva’s works, slashes of structure and Nature interfere and create an unstable, unbalanced setting that seems to refer to a minimalist environmental sculpture, or to modern land architecture. With no horizon line, the painting drips into a gaping abyss. The weight shifts, the architectural images are nothing more than the shell of void. Losing a hold of a defined reality, locality, and scale, the paintings resemble the world between game and catastrophe, sliding fields and battlefields. They imply the possibility of being a lively and playful playground on one side of the scope, and a war zone on the other.
The painting process and the canvas surface in Geva’s works play the role of a shifting ground, and offer these two possibilities (war and game) in the formal and physical aspect. The artist checks the ability of oil-based and water-based materials to absorb or to reject, to blend or to decompose with each other. As a result, Geva’s act of painting is unpredictable. The planned and the accidental are structured in the process of work, in which she sets up technical and formal traps, obstacles, and boundaries, in the form of pits, barricades, and organic eruptions.
In Geva’s canvases, the painting zone is always in between one act and the next. The painting actions and gestures, like a shell that covers and reveals, expose the fragility of architecture and of Nature, as well as the fragility of the painting.
