June 16, 2010
In
October 29, 2019
In
Orly Maiberg | Out of the Blue
At first, the paintings seem abstract – wide shots of diffuse, saturated, or dilutedstains –like an aerial view, satellite images, or perhaps a map that offers an abstract representation of the terrain. At second glance, the abstract space comes into focus and becomes clearer. The eye skips from site to site and starts recognizing figurative images: snowy ridges, steep slopes, serpentine creeks, or possibly tangles of thin capillaries and open cuts of bleeding paint. A more careful look reveals small figures and other concrete images scattered in the torn landscape –figures in action, events that offer a foothold of sorts.
The work process is completely bare and exposed. Washing, squeezing, cutting, pasting, brushwork, drawing. But despite its unplanned nature, it also seems considerably controlled. Further treatment instills meaning in the accidental. Random stains, cracks in the paint, a faded wash – all these serve as the starting point for deliberate interventions. Pieces of canvas cut from one painting are pasted onto another, but also reworked and integrated into the space, elevating it like a topographic map. From a different perspective, these supposed ridges, these strips of canvas, these patches look like bandages meant to heal the wounded, bleeding surface; to mend the blemishes inflicted on the landscape. And in-between there are pauses. Empty, quiet, seemingly “undone” areas, territories formed by their own concealment.
Wandering past the works may generate a sense of disorientation, in the absence of anchoring elements to hold on to. One’s ability to be in uncertainties, mystery, and doubts is a “negative capability,” wrote the Romantic English poet John Keats in one of his most quoted letters. How can a negative be considered a capacity? Keats understood that any good artwork feeds on these “adverse” ingredients. Where there is no silence there is no sound.
October 26, 2014
In
Maariv
December 26, 2020
In
Uncategorized
Layer Action, Kupferman Collection, Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot
May 3, 2015
In
Haaretz
March 2, 2022
In
Uncategorized
Where do we go from here, Solo Exhibition, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles
June 1, 2015
In
Time Out
June 4, 2010
In
City Mouse
December 18, 2024
In
That’s The Way It Is
That’s The Way It Is | Orly Maiberg
opening: 13/12/2024 closing: 02/02/2025
“Articles lost. What makes the very first glimpse of a village, a town, in the landscape so incomparable and irretrievable is the rigorous connection between foreground and distance. Habit has not yet done its work. As soon as we begin to find our bearings, the landscape vanishes at a stroke, like the façade of a house as we enter it. It has not yet gained preponderance through a constant exploration that has become habit. Once we begin to find our way about, that earliest picture can never be restored.”
“Illuminations: Essays and Reflections,” Walter Benjamin, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1968.
In July 2023, my exhibition Nohow On, Again On was presented at the Ticho House – a site-specific painting installation, some of which was created on-site. The work covered nearly the entirety of two main gallery walls and reached up, clinging to the ceiling.
By the time it returned to the studio, the work had grown significantly in scale. For a long time, it sat there like a beached whale, entombed in a museum-labeled cardboard box, blocking the studio entrance, and serving as a persistent reminder of how I was ignoring it.
After October 7th, I felt estranged in the studio. My playlists changed – now I listened mostly to Hebrew songs as a way of reorienting myself, counting every sharp, dense day with Another Day, a Matti Caspi song, with lyrics by Rachel Shapira:
“In its sharpness,
Another day, another day.
In its density,
Another day, another day.
To neither diminish nor escape,
Always striving to move on.
Moving on means: not walking away.”
Until one day, I unpacked the huge painting and spread it out on the studio floor.
My workspace was now covered by twenty-five square meters of canvas with winding edges, appearing boundless. I started marking and defining rectangular and square territories across the painted surface. With a sharp knife and heavy tailor’s scissors I cut small windows deep into the multilayered canvas. Day after day, I extracted fragments of landscapes, small figures, and abstract color fields.
The whole was now replaced by its parts, details and close-ups of events. I extracted 40 compositions I wanted to preserve and continued working on some of these, gluing and covering, repairing some torn parts, and ripping others.
The work on the studio floor remained punctured, with a disintegrated skeleton at its center.
That’s the way it is.
**
In the large paintings, a core of life is revealed—a remnant of destruction and erasure, or perhaps a hint of what is yet to grow.
Or maybe it is “the picture that can never be restored,” as Walter Benjamin put it.
Translated from Hebrew: Danii Amir