Slate Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Miriam Cabessa, which opens on February 6th and continues through March 7th. This is her second solo show at Slate Gallery, and it will feature her new series of gold paintings titled 79 after the atomic number for gold. The recent ... Read more
Slate Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Miriam Cabessa, which opens on February 6th and continues through March 7th. This is her second solo show at Slate Gallery, and it will feature her new series of gold paintings titled 79 after the atomic number for gold. The recent collapse of global financial markets and the ongoing volatility of world currencies have provoked widespread anxiety and insecurity. Cabessa “began to think about the symbolic and formal properties of gold; a multivalent material that connotes security and stability as well as greed, corruption and human rights abuses.” Her new paintings, a series of large and medium-scale gold abstract paintings, utilize gold’s inherent reflective and attractive tactile properties while alluding to its iconic status as the ultimate safeguard against financial instability.
Cabessa, who has long employed a performance based technique while working with a deliberately limited palette of paint on canvas, reveals that “using a limited palette…highlights the essence of my work: the act of creation”. In the series 79, Cabessa continues to follow her development as she takes her technique to another level. Bold singular movements have replaced the slow repetitive action of her previous work. Using everything she has to create in that moment, Cabessa’s larger gestures result in more dramatic and chaotic images that suggest landscapes, textiles and paradoxically bricks. The change reflects a shift away from process toward a focus on aesthetic experience. Indeed, gold’s dazzling visuality and heightened allusion to the eternal load them with meaning. “These paintings”, the artist contends, “beg to be looked at, to be examined at close range and from a distance, to be a source of pleasure.”
Miriam Cabessa was born in Casablanca, Morocco and grew up in Israel. She had a solo show in the Tel Aviv Museum in 1995, and she represented Israel in the 1997 Venice Biennale. In addition, she has exhibited in the Morris Museum, NJ; Herzilya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; Ben-Ari Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; the Jewish Museum of Pittsburgh, PA and the Kresge Art Museum, MI among others. 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 lives and works in New York City.
