Two years after her prize award exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum, Sharon Poliakine has come out with a new collection of paintings, drawings and sculptures that illustrate even more vividly than before that the contents of her studio are the prime source of her inspiration. Pencils, brushes, rags, spent tubes of paint are among the discarded objects that she presses into service, as well as, on this occasion, parts of an old piano and sheets of wood.
Of major interest is her cast aluminum Work Table where twisted human figures (fashioned from tubes of paint) are part of a silvered pool of devastation. Laid across this bleak tableau are strips of wood, elements that are given special prominence in this new exhibition, as emphasized by its title: Cast out the Beam. This phrase (taken out of context from the Book of Matthew in the New Testament), seems in this instance to refer to the end-point of the ‘journey’ taken by Poliakine’s materials. Wood, for example, originating in Nature, is brought into her studio, and then eventually sent out into the wide (art) world as a sculptural element, or as images integrated in her paintings and drawings.
Wood is a constituent in two unusual wall works: one comprising broken plates that have been used for mixing paints; the other featuring the lid of an old piano that has clearly been utilized for the same purpose. Both these items, and other works in this show, look back to the Art Povera movement of the late 1960s – art of impoverished materials.
Poliakine moves smoothly from one medium to the next, often employing identical motifs. In one mysterious painting (the title piece of this show) the artist has drawn her own face peeping through a barrier formed by planks of wood. In the background, small objects are glimpsed through layers of transparent paint, some shaped like tiny piano hammers. Real hammers provide a decorative element to Chandelier II, a wall relief fabricated from swirls of iron. A second version (Chandelier I) does not possess this feature. Instead, its inner space filled with twists of iron makes one think of a medieval torture wheel. Why these two pieces (which are not suspended from the ceiling) have been given the title Chandelier is beyond the comprehension of this writer. Neither of them cast out beams of light.
Intricate drawings and sketches are central to Poliakine’s art, her expertise in controlling the character and quality of f her lines stemming from the experience she obtained over an 18 year period at the Jerusalem Print Workshop as a master printer. Featuring a combination of fine tracery and sturdy wiry lines, they are displayed in this show as separate entities or else as major elements in her paintings. The effectiveness of this combination is especially well illustrated in a large format painting, part of an ongoing series that pays homage to famous artists. In this case her model was Fire at Sea (1895) by the British Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner.
Poliakine does not attempt a stylistic transformation (as Picasso did, for example, with Velasquez’s Maids of Honor). Instead, she has attempted through semi-abstract imagery that includes long diagonal lines and a twist of rope painted red, to capture the violence of the sea and the chaos of the scene, whilst also giving the impression that a frenzied group of people are clinging to the remnants of a boat.
Sharon Poliakine heads the Fine Arts Department at Haifa University. With this in mind, it may be appropriate to point to a didactic element in her work, namely that a good artist doesn’t need to work with expensive materials. With imagination, the humblest of objects will do.
Gordon Gallery, 95 Ben Yehuda St. Tel Aviv. Tel: 03. 5240323. Closing date: February 16, 2013.
