Arachne’s hair flowed away and with them both (her) nose and ears,

and (her) head becomes very small, she is also small in her whole body;

slender fingers cling on (her) side in place of legs, (her) belly occupies

the rest: from which, nevertheless, that (girl) lets out a thread, and the

spider works (her) ancient looms.

Minerva wins this epic tale and hopes that when humans would learn about Arachne’s fate, they would revere the mighty gods, In other versions of the story Minerva wins the tapestry contest with a far superior work, causing Arachne to be ashamed; Minerva takes pity on Arachne and turns her into spider so that she can continue to spin and weave for infinity. In both versions, the reader finds the Manichean theme of man versus god, the capriciousness of fate, as well as the internal struggles of the creative process.

Weaving has for centuries been considered a female occupation, and primarily a domestic talent, before being developed on an industrial scale…Today weaving and embroidery are used by mainstream artists as disparate as Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, Francesco Vezzoli, and Andrea Zittel.

Daniella Sheinman, an artist based in Tel Aviv, whose work has rejected color for the past twenty-one years. Sheinman also creates portraiture of female subject matter, albeit more specific than Self’s, for this exhibition, presenting three works that begin as small black and white drawings that are transferred to ceramic painting on glass. Untitled (My Mona Lisa I, II and III) are portraits

of her granddaughter created in 2015. All three works use an interior oval compositional structure to visually contain the portraits of the young woman: in each piece she is seen drawn, in ceramic printing on glass panels, from the bust up in black on a white surface, in the same pose as Leonardo da Vinci’s infamous heroin. While in Untitled (My Mona Lisa II and III) the viewer sees the woman as timeless, Untitled (My Mona Lisa I) includes the young woman wearing a logo sweatshirt, signaling her existence within a contemporary era. The titles are a nod to the artist’s affection for her progeny, elevating her from a typical young woman to one of the most mysterious and captivating figures in the history of art.

In each work the oval structures are disrupted by an overlay of erratic lines that may be read as web-like in places and landscape elements in others. In addition to obscuring some of the facial details in the works, this overlay of abstract lines disrupts the discreteness of the oval shaped portraits. The oval portraits are direct references to both the history of portrait and miniature painting, as mentioned above. Sheinman seems to call her subjects from another historical epoch, suggesting these are women of importance; however, she disturbs the sanctity of the portraiture with the web of lines, which is a typical motif of her work in painting as well as sculpture. Like Rauschenberg’s erased de Kooning, she obliterates her own handiwork, suggesting the process of reworking and rethinking the composition. One literally sees the angst and vulnerability of the creative process in the works—the ebb and flow of creative confidence and deflation. Using what appears at first to be straightforward portraiture, the artist tells the story of the creative process, as well as the story of women’s achievement, both past and present.

Through abstraction, the narratives – implied or otherwise – inherent with figuration are given over to a focus on materials, surface and form. In many ways it is a reduction, challenging both artist and viewer to go beyond the immediately recognizable and to concentrate on the application of line or color to find the expressed ideas. It is a notoriously difficult approach that, in the wrong hands can easily disappoint , with results that are merely decorative. However, Sheinman’s forays in this direction allowed her control of line and color to come forth, resulting in more powerful imagery and an interplay of line and pattern.

The early abstract pieces are bold and carefully constructed with a very direct visual impact. They are like declarative sentences that communicate without hesitation what the artist was crafting. Over time, these works, too, evolved into more spontaneous, more gestural compositions where the experimentation with different materials becomes more integrated. The use of new materials and support structures allowed the artist to explore new approaches with space and taking a very big risk in abandoning color – often the unifying component to painting – Sheinman was able to bring her work from a traditional, two-dimensional presentation to one that would harness the environment where the work was displayed. 

This is most evident in two major installation works undertaken in the late 90s – Interior Space presented at the Bayerische Vereinsbank in Frankfurt in 1996 and Meanings of Life at the Museum Ludwig in Koblenz in 1998. These works form the genesis of Sheinman’s focus on the power of the unadorned black line and the integration of the architectural setting to create a physical experience for the viewer.

The paintings, drawings and installations of the past twenty years are not mere formalist exercises, devoid of the persona of the artist. They are, in fact, attempts by the artist to evoke very personal experiences of the interior and exterior world. An example of this is one of her earliest installation pieces, Venus Rising From The Sea, a work reflecting on the famous Botticelli masterpiece of the 15th century. The imagery was a means for the artist to address inner thoughts and feelings that she experienced at the time and saw as a metaphor for the changes in her own life as well as in her work. The Venus image is one that recurs over time and a series of drawings on the subject were exhibited in the lobby of the then newly-reborn Plaza Hotel in Manhattan in 2008, an appropriate venue for the concept of regeneration.

String Line, first exhibited in Tel Aviv in 2013 (and presented as the signature installation for the 2015 edition of Art Palm Beach), encapsulates Sheinman’s pursuit of the simple black line to create and define rhythm and space. The individual, staccato lines merge together into an undulating pattern, underscored by the expanse of a monochrome background. String Line was inspired by Dave Brubeck’s 1959 Strange Meadowlark, a composition that begins with the piano in no clear time, but comes together in a unified whole with the entrance of the rest of the instruments. Indeed, with String Line the jerky individual lines begin to coalesce as the composition expands and reaches its conclusion.

Two decades ago, affected by a series of world-wide cataclysmic events, Sheinman eschewed color to harness the black line of graphite to emphasize the power of her compositions. Other natural materials formed the support for the subsequent works. String Line takes a step forward with the introduction of Plexiglas, clearly a non-natural material, yet one that allows the stark lines to expand into a limitless space, present, but undefined, not unlike Brubeck’s ground-breaking experimentation with musical forms.

Again, like a jazz composition that is never played the same way twice, String Line takes new forms, dependent upon its physical environment and yet transforming it to create a different experience.

Over the course of a thirty-year career, Sheinman has exhibited extensively in Europe, the United States and, of course, in Israel. The installation of String Line, together with her works on view in the Litvak Gallery booths, offer visitors to Art Palm Beach an opportunity to experience these imaginative and life-affirming works.

At the outset of her artistic career, Daniella Sheinman created colorful figurative paintings, but over the years, her paintings became monochromatic and free. Most of the works in the current exhibition are executed in black graphite on large-scale raw white canvases. They express the unique, personal and impressive language that the artist has developed during the past two decades – a language that is abstract, yet at the same time firmly constructed and meticulously designed.

At first glance, the works in the exhibition look spontaneous but they are, in fact, the product of precise, careful planning and Sisyphean labor with thick graphite lines. It is interesting to trace the process by which they are created. First, Sheinman created spontaneous and unmediated preparatory sketches in pencil on paper. Next, she photographed the sketches and printed them on slides, from which she built the desired image, sometimes through assembling the slides one on top of the other, either fully or partially overlapping each other. She then projected the chosen composition onto very large canvases in her spacious studio and sketched in the contour lines. In the final stage, she filled in the contour lines with dense graphite lines that all merged together as a black surface. During the work of filling in, the large pieces of canvas were rolled up and laid on the studio’s table, with only a small section left exposed to work on. The work of filling in was slow and laborious, and it was only at the end that the fabric was fully unrolled to reveal the complete artwork. From this standpoint, the artist’s work recalls that of printmakers, whose creations are wholly revealed only at the end of work process.

In contrast to the works in graphite, the art Sheinman has created in recent years on large sheets of paper is indeed spontaneous. In the spirit of the automatic painting espoused by artists of the Automatism movement in Europe at the beginning of the 20^th century, Sheinman allowed herself nearly absolute freedom. The works present frenzied, spontaneous and direct eruptions executed within a short time frame with direct, immediate motions on the paper that was hanging on the wall.

The entire exhibition, as well as its name, was created under a musical inspiration. Sheinman has played the piano since childhood, and her creative work in the studio is always accompanied by listening to music, which both provides inspiration for the painting and dictates her working rhythm. At the outset of her work on the Litvak Gallery exhibition, Sheinman considered installing variations on a piano in the center of the exhibition space, but finally decided to forgo its concrete realization and to leave only the sounds that guided her as she created the current installation.

The installation also includes rolls of Perspex that rise to a great height, recalling the gigantic totems made of raw, exposed eucalyptus wood that rose more than three meters high in Sheinman’s monumental exhibition “A Line of Tohu” (2009) at The Open Museum, Tefen Industrial Park, in northern Israel. In the current exhibition, an assemblage of clear Perspex rolls was placed in the Gallery’s soaring and expansive exhibition space, with the images that appear on the walls stamped in black upon the rolls. Sheinman says that she wanted to extract the lines from the paintings and insert them into the space, thus allowing the viewers to walk around within them and experience them, just as they experience the sounds of the music being played in the space. As Gideon Ofrat wrote in his essay for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition at Tefen, “[…] Sheinman’s lines do not sustain ‘outlines’ just as they don’t sustain the string-lines of celestial chords.”

Sheinman’s transition from color acrylic paintings to black-and-white paintings in graphite on canvas began in the 1990s, in her two solo exhibitions that I curated at the Haifa Museum. In the exhibition “Expulsion from Paradise” (1994), Sheinman presented variations on the fresco created by the renowned Renaissance artist Masaccio, who painted the expulsion from the Garden of Eden in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence in 1427. This was the last exhibition in which she displayed solely color paintings, but even in those works, it was possible to identify a thicket of lines drawn in black graphite within the composition. Three years later, in her monumental installation “Venus Rising from the Sea” (1997), Sheinman presented dozens of variations of Venus. She placed her earlier large color painting of Venus at the center of the exhibition, which was created in homage to Sandro Botticelli’s best-known painting, “The Birth of Venus” (1482-1484). In this triptych, a life-sized Venus was depicted three times, each time against a different colorful background. To express an alienated reality, the figure was placed in a tangle of abstract elements made up of frenzied, prickly black lines. The triptych was installed on the inner wall of a tremendous open wooden box that grazed the ceiling – a sort of quasi-cupboard, quasi-altarpiece. The installation’s centerpiece – the massive cupboard – rested on floor at the edge of a ten-meter wooden gangway, upon which Venus ascended from the sea, and then returned and descended to the viewer. Different variations of the Venus figure, drawn in black graphite on raw white canvas, appeared in the immense paintings that hung on the museum’s walls.

Out of the wide array of major solo exhibitions over the years – both in Israel and internationally – in which Sheinman presented graphite paintings on raw white canvas, it is worth noting the huge two- or three-dimensional installations shown in the exhibition “Interior Space” at Bayerische Vereinsbank in Frankfurt (1996) and also at Sotheby’s in Tel Aviv (1998), in the exhibition “Meanings of Life” at the Ludwig Museum of Modern Art in Koblenz, Germany (1999) and in the exhibition “A Journey into the Depths of Dreams” at the Museum of Israeli Art in Ramat Gan, Israel (2002).

The intuitiveness that reigns in Sheinman’s paintings creates the feeling that the intensity devours her life when it is spread over a diapason of subconscious emotions and experiences. Despite their expressiveness, the paintings are endowed with great intimacy and reflect a broad spectrum of human experiences. The artist takes upon herself the obligation to locate these emotions and give them expression in her work. When the accumulation of experiences bursts forth onto the canvas, it seems as though everything is happening there simultaneously, and the separation between past, present and future loses all meaning. The present, which is supposed to rule the moment, sometimes surrenders to the mighty forces of the past, and the future appears in the space of the painting as an unknown world containing a harbinger of hope. In the exhibition’s centerpiece, which occupies an entire wall ten meters long, Sheinman deals with the social and political changes that man foments in today’s world and describes the prevailing reality of chaos, for better or worse. The painting’s flickering lines relate to the storms and upheavals that rage upon human beings and leave them with a sense of uncertainty and at times, also helplessness.

Sheinman’s monochromatic paintings are constructed from rhythmic, free lines set down on the raw white canvas. The tonal connection between one fragment and another creates equilibrium that balances between the forms and leads to a dialogue that weaves a rhythmic partita, endowing the works with a new look. The works maintain a fascinating dialogue between the vulnerable, exposed and tender interior and the cruel, fortified exterior. This dialogue reflects the arena of struggle between man and the environment, and the constant wrestling that shapes his relationship with himself, with other people and with the world surrounding him.

Daniella Sheinman’s works do not focus on a particular period of her life but rather move between various occurrences from various times. Through the paintings, one can discern a philosophy of life transmitted from an individualistic perspective, and out of this worldview, the artist tries to put on the canvas, in each and every painting, life in its entirety and not in fragments. Thus, each painting seeks to give plastic expression to experiences of the soul that Sheinman accumulated over the course of her life. Sheinman’s riveting creation fundamentally carries dual meaning: On one hand, her abstract language and creative process radiate emotional and intellectual restraint, while on the other hand, the works arouse in the viewer tempests and emotions concealed in the flickering black lines on the raw canvases and transparent rolls like notes played on a keyboard from a musical score in black and white.

These paintings are the artist’s musical partita, inviting the viewer to move through the exhibition within the harmony of black lines alongside the disharmony of contrasting forms. The exhibition is the field of action upon which the lines and forms play games of direction and movement. They jostle with each other, push and pull, show themselves able to accept and reject, and create between themselves harmonic or disharmonic relationships, dynamic hierarchies that shape ever-changing power relations.

Daniella Talmor is the former chief curator, Haifa Museum of Art.

Daniella Sheinman’s installation, String Line (exhibited along with a small video installation by Nivi Alroy) reflects the Litvak Gallery’s change in direction, as well as denoting a significant development in Sheinman’s oeuvre. Her language has undergone a process of reduction and distillation. Stripped of human figures and color, Sheinman develops systems of black lines, which she also used in the past, into complex meshes. They refer perhaps to nature, recognizable as landscape (bushes and trees) or perhaps cellular structures, hugely enlarged. She draws with graphite on canvas and paper, and, together with cylinders made of plexiglas set up in the gallery, has created a formal, non-narrative space with momentum, interest, and a great degree of elegance.

A very large painting (10m of canvas) unfurled in the long, rectangular gallery space features interwoven graphite lines creating the feeling of fleeting landscapes as if on a journey, in a black and white film, or a distant memory. The work in graphite is precise, with the pressure invested in the work and its changing shades of black visible at a closer look. The thicket image is associated with a forest, concealment, safety and danger. In the Israeli context, Holocaust memory is unavoidable, similar to works by Ori Gersht, Nir Evron, and Yehudit Sasportas, who over the past decade, engaged in the image of the forest. The eight plexiglas “pillars” in the exhibit are objects of beauty with an elusive quality. They are dispersed throughout the gallery in such a way that some are revealed only by walking through the space. pillars are revealed partially only by walking through the space. Digital prints of linear drawings of labyrinthine forms are printed on the plexiglas. Their transparency is illusionary:  the tall pillars cache a secret, sealing off the option for the gaze to wander. The more one remains in the space, the more a dark, chaotic feeling arises despite the initial impression of brightness.  Another work on a long scroll of paper is installed at the gallery entrance in a niche at a height of more than 3m. Its format brings the calligraphic feeling to the fore. It is interesting to see how Sheinman’s work suggests links to artists influenced by the American Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline, such as Brice Marden, and, in a certain sense, Cy Twombly (who passed away two years ago).

The exhibition seems to be a contemplation of emptiness and transparency, an expression which has become a “buzz word,” and paradoxically so, since privacy, on nearly every level, has become a thing of the past. “Transparency” now involves a flooding of data which often confuses more than it clarifies.

Curator: Daniella Talmor

The exhibition of the Israeli artist is making waves in Germany.
Daniella Sheinman, a resident of Ramat Efal, was invited to present the exhibit, “Interior space” in Koblenz, near Frankfurt, and visitors to the exhibit can not remain indifferent.

Sheinman is a guest artist at the Ludwig Museum, one of the most highly respected collections in Europe. The museum’s branches are scattered throughout the cultural centers on the continent, and it is claimed to be standard- setter in the art world.

Sheinman’s exhibit deals with life. In this way Sheinman “hit the Germans over the head with a 5 kilo hammer”, in the language of one visitor.

The artistic treatment of Germany by Jewish artists is typically connected to death, due to understandable historical reasons.

Sheinman’s exhibit was a surprise in that she chose life from a fascinating perspective; the borders of life, or, more accurately, what can be said about life from an external point of view, from the point of view of death.

The installation,’ Interior Space’ is spread over a large floor space in the museum. On the top floor Sheinman displayed three private Variations on the famous Botticelli painting, ‘Venus Rising from Sea’. Sheinman’s Venus appears on three canvases light blue, green and pink- purple.
The exhibit, as well as Sheinman’s artistic path, was followed by former Prime Minister Shimon Peres who also dedicated a text in the catalog.

Whoever hurries can still catch the exhibit until 4th of July.

within Sotheby’s new display space. A space encompassed within a space, maintaining full command of the internal space she created.

In contrast to other exhibits, this one excels in Its simplicity and clarity. It is portrayed neither theatrically nor dramatically but rather by uniform brightness. The exhibit succeeds in combining a two dimensional impression with a three – dimensional non aggressive sculptural environment into an overall creation spectacularly designed, aesthetic but not over decorative, with an air of overbearing clean, lit radiance. It is unfortunate that the exhibition is scheduled to close after such a period.

The Installation “Interior space” of the Israeli artist Daniella Sheinman, who “captivates” the observer in the Ludwig Museum. When he has entered the room, he is already part of the slat labyrinth, which seems to want to keep him away from friezes of unusual monumental drawings on the walls – and forces him together with them which shows him his path, but when blocks this way with obstacles and barricades which restricts him like a prison- but also leaves him all freedom, also the one of the view.

Out of this silence the observer as well as the artist find back from destruction to a peaceful together, out of which new life starts. Is there a return to paradise after such a lot of sorrow? After so much fight a idyllic happy end? This would then be too hypocritical. And that is why Daniella Sheinman steers in another direction again, breaks up the idyll – Breaking up, which leads back to the beginning – end, which is beginning again.

In Daniella Sheinman’s installation Interior space however, confinement, fear, chaos and terror prevail. As soon as the visitor enters the installation in order to perceive its implicit order, he is locked inside the cage. He becomes a victim of his desire for intuition. He will realize too late that he is not the distanced spectator of someone else’s story, but a witness to something that turns out to be his personal biography.

This ambivalence between the general and individual can also be found in the drawings of the cycle, which skillfully reclaim a realm between pure abstraction and referential figuration.

Daniella Sheinman’s cycle does not begin in the Garden of Eden, in paradise. It starts with the fall of Man, the loss of innocence and the subsequent expulsion from paradise. It opens with a thunderbolt, announcing agitation and inner conflict as a leitmotif. In the first two drawings, figures are depicted inside a rectangle symbolizing a door or gate. In the third drawing the theme of the expulsion becomes manifest: Adam covers his face and walks with his head bowed in shame. The echo like repetition of the figures of Adam and eve is accompanied by the recurrent motif of a gate that is gradually poised and threatening to fall. In the initial eight drawings Daniella Sheinman depicts the expulsion from paradise no less than six times. Entangled in a dense grid of lines, the characters seem to be alienated or imprisoned in a web.

Several aspects of interpretation come to one’s mind when looking at the entire ensemble.

The cycle of drawings itself offers a different level of interpretation. It depicts the development

Of man after the explosion from paradise, but it also depicts the rebirth to a state of awareness that is the origin of love and creativity (and maybe artistic creation in particular) and humanity.

The allusions to music and dance bring Wagner (and his reflections on Nietzsche) to one’s mind. The Installation refers also to an important cycle from the turn of the century: Gustav Klimt’s” Beethoven Frieze” in the “New Secession” in Vienna, which was created in 1902. Its theme is not just a transformation of music into painting; it is also a hymn to life.

The viewer is forced to witness this narrative through he confinement of the bars he participates in it and experiences it in a successive perception. There is almost no going back.

He becomes a prisoner of his emotions, he is finally confronted with his own (German) history, the history of   National Socialism and the Holocaust.

The artist is actually reluctant to emphasize this aspect. It is almost impossible however, to avoid this association.  In the ambivalence of death and hope the installation combines the memory of the ineffable atrocities of the past with survival in the present time. Daniella Sheinman deliberately associates death with survival, creativity and humanity as harbingers of hope.

In her 1991 painting Mythical Clouds, Daniella Sheinman depicted her soldier son with a storm of expressive color stains and wiggly black lines raging around him.

At the bottom of the work she drew hands dragging smears of red paint.

Sketched on young soldier’s chest was a square black outline, and in it – a curved spiral. While this pattern recurs throughout the work, running across it like an ornament – design, when it is thus delineated on the soldier’s chest it looks like a target. Feeling of anxiety and chaos bustle around the son’s painted figure; these combine with the knowledge about the atrocities and horrors that engulf him, making him a part of them. The painterly affinity between those interwoven arrays of dense black lines sprouting in the 1991 piece Mythical Clouds and the current works featured in this show is formally conspicuous, despite a manifest reduction that distinguishes between those past works and the present ones. The female point of view – the mother’s cry vis -a vis her son’s whereabouts- leads in the current works to the obliteration of narrative (the son’s figure), color (the expressive articulation) and texture. This may attest to the artist’s having arrived at a stage of meticulous exhaustion of her work process, or perhaps indicate that the anxiety of loss is almost indescribable.

At first sight, it is perhaps surprising to tie Daniella Sheinman’s large scale works, which embed intersected arrays of thickened graphite lines, with embroidery or lace works (which, in our consciousness , are perceived rather as intimate works incorporating threads or other fibers) In this essay I will attempt to indicate the similarities between the artist’s work procedure and elements contained in her pieces, and the mode of work of those practicing the crafts of  embroidery, needlepoint or lacework. It ought to stressed that at the end of the process, the common denominator linking Sheinman’s work to the traditional model is entirely unstitched- an unraveling that leads to the creation of a unique mode of work.

Despite the similarities outlined between laceworks and Sheinman’s pieces, It is evident that the artist adopts the traditional model only ostensibly. The similar work procedures in fact emphasize the process of unstitching, aimed at forming a different language of expression while rejecting the place at which the work supposedly belongs. In Greek mythology, in the story of Odysseu’s return home from his journeys, it is told how during his long absence, every night, his wife Penelope (who was what we now call ‘grass widow’) used to secretly unravel what she had woven during the day; thus she managed to avoid fulfilling her promise to marry one of her suitors after she  finished weaving a shroud for her father in law, laertes. Penelope used the traditional tools at her disposal; by shrewdly shifting them from their customary role, how ever, via the act of unraveling, they granted her the power to influence her fate, or at least suspend and deflect it slightly from its foreseen course.

In her work, Sheinman employs seemingly familiar and non threatening contexts (female crafts, or the e’ art of drawing’), and yet changes the customary variables within them. This is evident, for example, in her choice of a large format as a basis for the work; In the use of drawn rather than real threads; in the fact that the drawing is executed on a canvas originally intended for painting in oil or acrylic; and in the drawing that is devoid of  the ‘sensitivity’ or ‘vibration’ of the pencil line. The variables’ shifting challenges the traditional model, the mode of work that was presumably designated for her and predicated. Moreover, drawing performed on canvas on such a large scale is inevitably invested, to some extent, with a show of force. The act of drawing, which is usually perceived as a ‘sensitive and intimate’ form of expression, goes beyond that, becoming defiant, while working taking over the entire scope of the display space. One must note that in her previous exhibitions at the National Maritime Museum in Haifa (1997) and the Ludwig Museum im deutschherrenhaus in Germany (1999), Sheinman combined wooden constructions and sculptural objects that together formed a total three dimensional installation. These installations, like stages-sets, accentuated the architectural potential concealed in the drawings. The dimensions of the works and the artist’s work regime transformed the act of drawing into an obsessive physical act, burdensome and painful. The use of a lump of lead – a highly toxic substance-conceals the potential of danger and death. The lines twisting on the canvas resemble a latticework of wires, an unraveled net, or a torn fence. It seems that nothing in common has remained between the pricky gray lines and the delicate, soft lace napkins.

In his book, the periodic Table Primo Levi describes the qualities of lead through the character of Rodmund, the lead – prospector: “lead is actually the metal of death: because it brings on death, because its weight is a desire to fall, and to fall is a property of corpses, because its very color is dulled dead, because it is the metal of planet Tuisto, which is slowest of the planets, that is the planet of dead. I also told him that, in my opinion, lead is a material different from all other materials, a metal which you feel is tired, perhaps tired of transforming itself and that does not want to transform itself anymore: the ashes of who knows how many other elements full of life, which thousands upon thousands of years ago were burned  in their own fire”.

Sheinman indeed rejects any interpretation that ties her work to the memory of the holocaust, and yet a sense of imminent nullity and death is inevitable in view of these works. A closer look at her earlier piece Mythical Clouds, mentioned at the beginning of this essay, takes us back to the battlefield. Through assiduous diligence the artist traces upon lines, like fire -brands that encircle and close in on the viewer. She spins her private story as a women and a mother, with its various textures, recounting it within a public display space.

Daniella Sheinman’s works are laid on the floor in a studio located in a large hangar in a moshav (cooperative settlement) in central Israel. This is the first time I visit Sheinman in this studio. Years ago I visited her in the studio she had in the basement of her private home, and she showed me long canvas scrolls in full due to the space limitations. Despite the harsh viewing conditions, there was something about those works that captured my attention. They attested to a type of Sisyphean, persistent work that unfolded over many meter of canvas. Moreover, they exhibited a measure of determination. Confrontation of such large canvases requires neutralization of the desire to see the finished product. There is a quantifiable commitment in such practice.

It has been a long while since, and the works I saw this time were nothing like those other works back then. Some time ago Sheinman sent me the catalogue of an exhibition she has had in respectable bank in Germany, where she mounted a large scale installation consisting of wooden lattice, large drawings and sculptural elements incorporated throughout. That work, which traveled from the bank to the Ludwig Museum im Deutchherrenhaus, Koblenz, was the origin of the work I saw when I entered Sheinman’s present studio. When I looked at the canvases, I recalled an excerpt from a letter written by French novelist Gustav Flaubert to Louise Colet on January 16, 1852:

“The finest works of art are those in which there is the least matter. The closer expression comes to thought, the more the word clings to the idea and disappears, the more beautiful the work of art”.
Sheinman’s early paintings, in the period that preceded the aforementioned scrolls, were highly colorful and expressive. They were comprised of figures and colors stains, and incorporated a readable narrative.

Surprisingly, the painting became a type of dilution that calls to mind the principles of homeopathy. The principal substance is thinned to the point of non presence, and a new substance is obtained in its stead that carries the qualities of the original substance, yet is typified by such a degree of dilution that the poison transforms into a healing potion. Drawing has come to replace painting. Rawness itself has become a value independent of manifestation.

And what does the eye see? It sees the lines transforming into latticed grids, bars curving into organic forms; figures losing and re- acquiring form. It observes an extensive surface where the gaze is set free.

In Sheinman’s OEUVRE one can consistently identify how the artist uses traditional means to generate painting that is modern and current in essence. In these paintings presented to us there, the gap between the world of imagination and visual phenomena on one hand, and the exposed world of reality on the other, Is highly manifest. Despite Its title and definition, it is a world invisible to the viewer who is unfamiliar with the artist’s inner reality. The sights presented to us by Sheinman can be grasped only by exposing the world that motivates her to work with canvas and graphite pencil. It is clear to us that elsewhere in the world mothers would not have made anxious painting such as the early works by Sheinman the mother, or, for that matter, any other Israeliness itself, then when coming to explore Sheinman’s works one must certainly be aware of her Israeliness in particular, and her affinities to the world of art in general.