NYAB Event - Miriam Cabessa “an•thro•pom•e•try”

Miriam Cabessa “an•thro•pom•e•try”

Jenn Singer Gallery

This event has ended.

Jenn Singer Gallery presents an•thro•pom•e•try, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Brooklyn-based Moroccan Israeli artist Miriam Cabessa. Since representing Israel at the Venice Biennial in 1997, Cabessa has gained international recognition with work held in prestigious private and public collections including The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Tel Aviv Museum of Art; the Haifa Museum of Modern Art; and The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.

Noted collector, curator and philanthropist Tim Nye’s text on the exhibition offers perfect insight into Cabessa’s sensual, expressionist paintings: “I love the use of the term ‘anthropometry’ to describe the work of Miriam Cabessa. She is in good company with ‘Anthropometry Paintings’ as the description Yves Klein used for his trademark blue body prints of women. The cool scientific implication is offset by the incongruous combination of ‘poetry’ and ‘anthropology’”.

In creating her newest body of work, Cabessa used personal items – love letters, her favorite books, diary entries, etc. - coated in paint and then pressed onto panel or canvas. The imprints these emotionally meaningful objects leave behind are interestingly suggestive, sometimes erotic and sometimes reminiscent of scientific slides – alive with texture and patterns. Regardless of how they reveal themselves, the secrets of the artist are buried under layers of paint, turning fingerprints of nostalgia into abstract imagery.

Nye describes the new collection as “‘Memory Paintings”, writing that “…the imprint is more fossil than print, as she uses objects that should only reveal superficial contours. The words— the pulsing blood —through the mystical conjuring of the artist are also revealed… The halo of the image vibrates like a Rothko; but it’s as if her attempts to anchor the object on canvas are futile, and the memory does not want to adhere, but floats from the surface and retreats to the depths of the artist’s’ private interior”.

Miriam Cabessa was born in Morocco, grew up in Israel, and has lived and worked in New York City since 2000. Her slow action painting has been internationally recognized since 1997 when she represented Israel at the Venice Biennale. Over the past two decades, she has abstained from using brushes, opting to make marks with objects and her body. Her imagery ranges from organic to mechanistic with surfaces that are both haptically handmade and digitally serene.

Cabessa graduated from Ha’Midrisha College of Art, Israel in 1993, had a solo show at Dvir Gallery that year, and in 1995 won the Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation Israeli Art Prize that included a solo show at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Cabessa has exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally. Recently, she performed ‘Variation with Hands’, with music by Jonathan Sheffer, at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2012), exhibited with Nye+Brown Gallery in Los Angeles (2012), and had a solo show at Julie M. Gallery in Tel Aviv (2014). She has also shown at the Morris Museum, NJ; Herzilya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; The Israel Museum, Israel; Ben-Ari Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; the Jewish Museum of Pittsburgh, PA; and the Kresge Art Museum, MI.

Her work is in the collections of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Tel Aviv Museum of Art; the Haifa Museum of Modern Art; The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; and Texas State University.

Cabessa has received awards from the American-Israeli Cultural Foundation (1994 and 1995); the Ministry of Science and the Arts Prize for Young Artists in Israel (1995); and the International Studio & Curatorial Program, sponsored by the NY Cultural Corporation Commission (2001). She has been a member of the Artist Pension Trust since 2012.

Currently, Steinway & Sons is exhibiting a giant reproduction of Miriam’s painting Gold Landscape in their Manhattan storefront, as facilitated by Culture Corps.

Media

• Painting

ADVERTISE ON NYAB