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.

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 20th 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 Sheinman 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 Large-Scale 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 Sheinman’s 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 the 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.

“For the Lord has a day of vengeance, a year of recompense for the cause of Zion… And He shall stretch over it a line of tohu and stones of bohu” (Isaiah 34:8-11). Isaiah’s apocalyptic prophecy of destruction was interpreted by Nahmanides in terms of artistic creation: “… He shall stretch over it a line of tohu and stones of bohu, because the line is related to the thought of the building that the architect wishes to make…”1 The line of tohu (literally, a line of chaos) is thus interpreted as the measuring line used by the artist (architect) in order to give form to a creation which is doomed to destruction.

Sheinman’s lines, … are lines of collapse and rupture: partly frames of collapsed buildings, partly broken veins and arteries, partly torn, disheveled dry branches.

The artistic line has come a long way from the optimistic Jugendstil line of the 1900s – the bifurcating branch line, or the hair line flowing gracefully in waves, decorative and ideal – to Sheinman’s lines of the second millennium, lines of harm and injury that negate unity and continuity; lines of tohu.

And above all, it is rhizomatic drawing, responding to the centralized blooming movement (or to a single stem or trunk) with a movement of spreading-extending-multiplying lines across a plateau.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari coined the term “rhizome,” describing it thus in their book A Thousand Pleateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Paris, 1980): Evolutionary schemas would no longer follow models of arborecent descent going from the least to the most differentiated, but instead a rhizome operating immediately in the heterogeneous and jumping from one already differentiated line to another.

The 9/11 series is more abstract than any of Daniella Sheinman’s work thus far. With it, she seems to come back full circle to her abstract starting point after her meeting with Kiva. The “thicket” is stormier than ever and the view of destruction, while avoiding drama, is also more forceful. The drawings’ title cannot but make us think of ripped building iron rods and torn steel skeleton frames.

Despite the metaphysical-apocalyptic aspect of Daniella Sheinman’s 9/11 paintings/drawings, these are not works that paralyze our thought. On the contrary, they call upon us to reflect on the vanity of utopian towers (from the Tower of Babel, via the WTC towers, to the towers of Kuala Lumpur and Dubai) and on the lies of Utopia in general. As such, these works, like their predecessors (Venus, the Expulsion from Eden) are in accord with the postmodern tradition of opposing the notion of Utopia.

Sheinman’s abstract language and artistic means guarantee mental detachment and emotional restraint, thus avoiding the effects of the “desire for the Real.” The traces of disaster drawn with infinite care on the big canvases are attentive to the quiet after the storm, taking care to remain on the boundary-line between the horrifying content and the autonomous shapes that ensure the “free play of the cognitive faculties” (Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, 1790). On this level, these drawings’ response to Absolute Evil is to suggest human freedom, artistic freedom.

_____________________________________

Between Two Worlds

Ruthi Ofek

An installation creates a world – an independent space. From the moment one enters the installation space, the entire event is internal to it, cut off from its surroundings. Unlike a regular exhibition of artworks, where the space is a given in which the works are presented, an installation turns the entire space into a single artwork. In this context, Ellen Ginton has pointed out the “The paradoxical nature of installation – which is real, three-dimensional, physical, and at the same time possesses a misleading power stemming from its ability to contain the viewer, embrace him, and cut him off from reality.”

This is Daniella Sheinman’s third installation work, borrowing elements from the previous ones – Interior Space in Bayerische Vereinsbank in Frankfurt (1996), and Meanings of Life at the Ludwig Museum of Modern Art in Koblenz, Germany (1999). According to Pinchas Noy, “the beauty, greatness and aesthetic value of art stem from neither its contents nor its form or any other primary means of expression, but rather from the ability to combine them each time anew in new, original, creative ways.”3 Indeed, Sheinman’s three installations demonstrate the artist’s striking ability to use the same elements, combined with new ones, in different contexts, thus rending them fresh and original. What these three installations have in common is their materials. Sheinman does not attempt to astound or touch the viewer by means of cutting-edge technology or spectacular lighting. The installation is made entirely of simple, almost “humble” materials: canvas, graphite, wooden and plaster bars. It has none of the plethora of pyrotechnics to which we have become accustomed in installations of the last years, nor does it astound one at first glance; herein lies its power. Its simplicity is joined by a sort of well-planned workmanship – while, at the same time, the installation provokes a feeling of disorder by quite a few means, thus enhancing the effect of that remarkably systematic labor. The monochromatic palette – white, gray, black, and natural wood – intensifies the sense of restraint.

The third installation, at the Open Museum at the Tefen Industrial Park, continues the first two. Here, pillars were added to the familiar elements of wooden bars, mummy and scroll. The bars have been dismantled and installed in clusters along the walls, and the space itself remains open and fenceless. It seems as if the previous installations have been shattered or fragmented. There is no longer a single line leading the viewers along; they may now choose whether to turn right or left. However, the resulting chaos or confusion is not absolute, since the pillars endow the installation with a certain sense of stability. According to Sheinman, she knew already when working on the second installation that there would be a third stage of disintegration. This installation brings to mind political events such as the 9/11 collapse of the World Trade Center towers in New York, or the Palestinian Intifada, conveying the notion that the global and the national are mixed together, a sense of chaos from without as well as from within; a feeling that there are no more safe places in the world, that all boundaries have been breached. Sheinman says that she tries to look at things optimistically: “I try to fantasize about a route by which the clash between East and West will eventually lead to their blending together and to each accepting and better understanding the other.”

The main elements of the installation – the mummy, the scrolls, and the pillars – are taken from the world of antiquity and are part of humankind’s collective memory. These visual elements, referring to the past, come together in the installation with contemporary events in which the boundary between collective and personal memory is also blurred. That blurring occurs when extreme events cause the outside to permeate what is inside or project the interior onto the exterior. According to Rachel Elior, “the public is an undefined corpus that establishes unity while endowing the individual with an identity consisting of memory and history, language and sacred texts, covenants and laws, precepts and sacraments, and defining geographical, cultural, historical, and national boundaries that contain an element which is unifying internally (Israel) and differentiating externally (Goyim).” In Sheinman’s installation, the public is not only Israel or the Jewish people, but the whole of humanity, eastern and western, of which the individual is part (Israel, too, is an individual part of the global whole). Events, even those that seem to take place far away, are in fact nearby, dictating the course of the here and now.

The pillars represent stability and presence: “…in a pillar of cloud by day…and in a pillar of fire by night” (Exodus 13:21). Are the two pillars in the installation the central pillars that support a house?

Perhaps they are like the twin pillars Yachin and Boaz, erected by King Solomon in the holy Temple he built in Jerusalem, which were endowed with a special status. Mordechai Omer explains: “The association between Yachin and Boaz, between left and right, is the same as the association prevailing in the cosmological system – an interaction between the right, which is ‘the dimension of the effective element,’ and the left, which is ‘the dimension of the receptive kingdom.’ Posting these two pillars side by side testifies to the need both for a measure of stability and of renewal in order to sustain the order of the world.” Are the pillars posted in the installation in order to convey a sense of balance?

According to Sheinman, the pillars represent two beaten human figures attempting rapprochement. They are made of solid raw wood, their imposing presence conveying strength and stability. On the surrounding walls, painted, two-dimensional pillars appear like shadows of the three-dimensional ones. The drawn pillars are depicted in several variations, always (except once) appearing in pairs. We are familiar with many pillars in the history of humankind: from totems and obelisks to famous artworks by Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brâncuşi, or Joseph Beuys.

The scroll is associated with the pillars on the one hand and with the mummy on the other. Unlike Sheinman’s former installations, where it was hung along the walls, here it becomes an object that stands right in the middle of the space, a cylinder of sorts, directed upwards like a pillar. “I see the act of turning the two-dimensional scroll into a three-dimensional one as an attempt to change things. My hope is that the spirit may carry things upwards, that hope may arise. Even if it seems impossible at present, let’s hope that in future things may turn out differently,” says the artist. Like her drawings, the scroll is made in graphite on canvas – it is a drawing which is spread out over many meters, depicting shapes and shadows in lines and stains. At times, the graphite pencil is pressed hard enough to draw a sharp, black line, and at times it is used to draw different shades of gray. The length of the scrolldrawing evokes a sense of infinity, referring to the endless cycle of the universe with its ever-present basic elements.

Daniela Sheinman’s monumental installation,” Venus Rising from the Sea”, 1997, was created as an homage to Sandro Botticelli’s best known masterpiece, “the  birth of Venus”, 1482-84. It incorporates old and new elements- a practice characterizing Sheinman’s work in general. The installation centerpiece is triptych of Venus in blue, green, and pink, which took her eight months to complete during a personal crisis in 1988. ” My bond with Venus” says the artist, ” started when I was undergoing crisis. I saw the motif of the birth of Venus as a metaphor for the change that was taking place in me”.

The large painting, in acrylic on canvas, is placed in a quasi- cupboard, quasi- altarpiece box reaching towards the ceiling at the end of a wooden gangway. Venus rises from the sea and walks towards the viewer on a ten meter long gangplank.

Painted with graphite on canvas, different variations of an almost life-size full image of Venus are exhibited in a separate display area.

She fills the visual fields and appears to be closing in on the viewer. The monochrome black and white figures create a sequence of images of Venus rising from the sea, expressed in a new visual language which create anew environment. In this space as well as in the installation Sheinman breaks through the two dimensional boundary of the work, treats the visual space and creates a new territory. The environmental work generates a rhythmic sequence of figures that produces the complete picture.

The linear variations on the figure of Venus look either veiled, or doubled, or reminiscent of a martyr. The linear painting highlights Sheinman’s homage to Botticelli, the great master of linear painting.

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.

If one looks carefully on Daniella sheinman’s paintings, it will be discovered, sooner or later, that the “couple interaction” at the core of her work is the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, not the event itself but, as the learned observer knows, that of the Renaissance artist Masaccio, wich was part of the famous fresco cycle wich he painted in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence in 1427.

There is no doubt that this is one of the most forceful paintings produced by the west, but this is not the place to present Masaccio’s full importance. It is obvious that Masaccio gave, especially to painting, a new kind of monumentalism and force, and a special presence and physical mass.  He presented a proposition for painting which was then considered less monumental and thus of less importance as a medium than sculpture. But Masaccio is important not only for the formal aspect of his assertion, but also the engrossing psychological and human description of the new man, his feelings  of frustration and pain, fully exposed and vulnerable in his nudity. Flesh and blood. Masaccio’s expulsion scene, perhaps more than any other expulsion scene, presents the psychological dimension which he brought to the renewed painting of the Italian Renaissance. The scene has great force and it is not surprising that even an artist such as  the “divine” Michelangelo  was influenced by it when he  himself approached the subject. It is therefore e possible to view this scene by Masaccio as man looking at himself, as a born again child expelled from the giant’s garden if to relate to Oscar wild’s story and thus to modern iconography.

In short when Daniella Sheinman chose this scene her choice was intuitive and correct. Indeed her relation to the biblical scene which has a defined Jewish/Christian meanings, is a rather personal connection, modern, and far from theology and religion. Quoting from the past in general, and particularly today, is a recognized and common practice. In post modernist terms it is an appropriation- the use of cultural property for her own purposes. Furthermore, the use of appropriation for “cultural” or fashion purpose is far from Sheinman, who connected with the scene through its drawings- the power of the image and its depth in humanist and expressive terms. She related to classic scene despite the Post modern stimulatory paradigm and not because of it. She connects to the content of the scene, and the resultant series she terms” Couple interaction”. On the one hand  this is almost a clinical definition , but on the other hand  for her the expulsion from the garden of Eden was  an archetypal/ personal event  in which  the subject is not  the expulsion as a separation from god, rather the relationship between the two people  expelled , between themselves is the subject which as  a result  of the expulsion presented  them with a ” fallen” grey reality, a wizening which they rather , and Sheinman understood and internalized the scene in her own unique way.

At this point I would like to stop the first impression in the works and review briefly  Sheinman’s past and the not so simple road which brought her to the complex an crystallized point which she arrived at with series of paintings presented in this exhibition.  In general I wish to emphasize Sheinmans’s special authenticity and. Maybe, even her personal naivete, and to stress them as point of merit, possibly an essential  part of her own since there is in them an unpretentious faithfulness to herself- an important  and all too often forgotten asset. This unreserved faithfulness to herself can be seen in her development and her educational path which is very long; and perhaps even in her development in measured steps.

It is therefore also clear that at that stage  the modernist liberalization, in the broadest and most general sense – the modernist agenda , and if only for example  as a step in the face to bourgeois taste, all this did not take up much place in her world.

What is no less important to our story is that Sheinman was very aware that something was missing. She understood that almost everything she learned had not really brought her close to art and creation. In her own eyes she was not a painter, feeling that she was standing in front of a wall which she needed to break down.

Her meeting with Kiwe was formative and it extricated her from the situation she was in, her slumber in all that was related to modernism. The summary of what Kiwe suggested to her she describes in one simple sentence” Begin to play”. This fundamental suggestion, meaning the introduction of play into her world and her art which had become cemented in her knowledge of tradition, is exactly what she needed.  Her accumulated knowledge was totally foreign and disconnected from her personality and her world and from her need to express herself.

Sheinman was ready and open to this suggestion. In any event and not only on the personal psychological level, but also on theoretical level, playing is undoubtedly one of the fundamentals of the modernist paradigm. The cubists, for example played with “play blocks” and even dice appear in their paintings. They insisted that painting and pictorial investigation have a serious basis in play. This was a way of thought and a way of work, almost a way of life. Their influence in this matter was enormous. Thus their e is no wonder  that the philosopher  Ortega Y. Gasset , in his article  ” The Dehumanization of the Art”(Madrid 1925), an article  that can be seen as  a self examination, after a quarter  of a century of early modernism, counted play as one of the fundamental values of modernism. The place of play in modern art was from its beginning central. Kiwe’s suggestion to Sheinman, which was in fact her first connection to modernism, was also the point where she began her personal and artistic liberation.

In the present installation – Interior space- Daniella Sheinman presents a new spectacle, which in one stroke abolishes every previous framework.

In the new three-dimensional territory, Sheinman expands her field of activity, but concurrently and insistently she eliminates color, posits a limit, blocks visibility.

But the bursting of the two -dimensional framework is revealed as a momentary illusion of freedom.

“Now you see, now you don’t see is the name of the game. The installation Interior Space is concentrated around three dimensional elements, the affinity among which is created by virtue of the paradox that characterized the components of each, as well as the complexity of the connections among them.

The scroll that enwraps the outer limit of the space and closes upon the cage which closes upon the mummy enclosed in Its shrouds creates an installation that deals with man’s existential situation. Here, every possible option cancels out the other, and the viewer who finds himself inside this  web can do nothing but take in part  in the only possibility given him – the freedom of the game.

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.