Michal Gavish “Crystalline City”

Long Island University/ Brooklyn Campus Art Galleries

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The Humanities Gallery at LIU, Brooklyn presents the first NYC solo exhibition of installation artist Michal Gavish.

To a chemist, urban structures are familiar: they look naturally constructed, growing like crystals in a laboratory. Michal Gavish, originally a chemist studying these structures, now creates large, handmade prints of cityscapes from her past in the manner of the crystals she used to study. In her new exhibition Crystalline City, Gavish will exhibit for the first time her prints deconstructing her new hometown of Washington, DC. These will be shown alongside her recent personal pieces on New York neighborhoods.

Gavish rearranges her photography-based images of city buildings into geometries that extend vertically. She recasts familiar city streets into invented layouts, instilling undercurrents of turmoil in the magnificent, quiet buildings. She builds scaffoldings of infinitely long rows of windows and columns. These careful compositions of multiple lines, squares and rectangles display magnificent patterns of crystalline-like geometries.
Printed on translucent fabric layers, the vacant structures become intimate memories of contemporary archaeological sites. These images emerge like thin embroidery patterns that sometimes appear flat and at other moments are three-dimensional.

Michal Gavish is an installation artist currently living and working in Washington, DC. Her work is influenced by her previous career as a research scientist. She exhibits internationally, including a solo museum show in Budapest. Gavish writes reviews and lectures extensively on Art and Science. She has curated group shows in the NY area and was awarded several artist residencies in NYC and Europe.