special Exhibit - Crossover

Mindy Weisel  

Acclaimed abstract painter, Mindy Weisel started to work with glass in 2005. Her lifelong exploration of themes emerging from conscious and subconscious thought and complex emotional situations, found in glass a new outlet of expression.

Weisel's childhood as the daughter of Holocaust survivors has marked her aesthetic perspective and has left a strong imprint on her artistic path. Weisel's early paintings on canvas and paper were dark and bleak and bore hidden and half-hidden references obscured under heavy layers of paint - calligraphic signs, words, or the number A3146 tattooed on her father's forearm in Auschwitz. These abstract compositions, that evoked an atmosphere of horror, death and destruction, were followed by the explosion of color that has characterized all of her work since then. Weisel's intuitive and highly expressive style - the  absence of imagery, vigorous and spontaneous brushwork, multiple layers of color and textures, gestural surface marks and swift scribbling - has much in common  with the action- or gestural-paintings associated with post-war American abstract expressionism. 

Crossing over from painting to glass proved to be a revealing experience imbuing Weisel's work with an unprecedented luminosity, weightlessness and transparency.  Made of liquid, broken and cut glass ranging from transparent to colored, and then fused in the kiln with powders, frit and stringers, her glass compositions demonstrate emotional energy, visual intensity and vivid tonal contrasts similar to those of her paintings. Weisel has found in glass a medium that captures and discloses manifold layers of emotion. The physical act of layering glass is, indeed, an essential aspect of the finished work: "When you work with glass they really do show through; you see the layers of emotion". For the artist the working process itself - creating something new out of broken, shattered, fragmented or smashed glass symbolizes rebirth and renewal out of the ashes. 

Curator: : Henrietta Eliezer Brunner

Opens: June 26, 2014