Daniella Sheinman – “Shulchan Aruch”

Hovav Givati - Curator Translated from Hebrew by Yoel Sheridan September 2003

Daniella Sheinman is not easy on herself in her choice of artistry. She is characterized by her curiosity and development she has undergone over the years. She began with figurative painting and continued into comprehensive abstracts that she exhibited in the “Gordon” gallery (1987), and in the free abstract style exhibition in “Nellie Aman” (1990) – physical operative paintings that she then called “The passage from external to internal paintings”. On her way to the inner person, she painted her soldier son and on his chest drew a black line and in it a spiral that resembled a target and around them was a storm of colored stains and black twisted lines.

In her later works, Sheinman continues in the direction from where she started and painted installations and paintings based on open-ended or connected threads and lines, using the technique of graphite on large canvases or constructing wooden installations that represent lines into space, combined with other sculptured objects. In her treatment of Botticelli’s Venus (the ideal woman), open threads without end and resonant images were painted with a rigid intensiveness and monotony (similar to the work of Tal Matzliach).

In the new installation in the “On the Cliff” (“AL HATZOK”) Gallery (Netanya) her work is absolutely personal and private. Sheinman reproduces the Garden of Eden of her childhood, the house and yard of her grandparents where she grew up, and the father she did not know, and she tries to sew and knit them together again from her memories. Her grandmother’s lace tablecloths draped over a camera, pictures of the house and yard replicated and cut on papers and transparencies, and all these together are stuck on plain wooden planks, or arranged as a shaky family table, a fantasy that tries to return to a lost childhood.