November 18-24, 2004

art

Conflict Resolution

Tamar Hirschl, Fall (2003, detail), digital print on vinyl with collage, acrylic and ink.

Tamar Hirschl makes her often-unpleasant memories work in her favor.

by Susan Hagen

From her firsthand experience with the Holocaust, to the conflicts in Croatia and Israel, to the terrorist attacks in New York, artist Tamar Hirschl has a unique, if unenviable, trove of memories with which to work.

Born in Zagreb, Croatia, Hirschl lived in Israel until 1999 and now resides in New York City. Her perspective on human strife and healing informs her recent paintings and drawings, now on display at the Art Alliance. She explores these experiences using approaches from the abstract to the illustrative to the personal.

The Art Alliance has gathered a group of abstract works done with acrylic, enamel and crayon-on-paper, all from 1999, in one gallery. Six vertically oriented pieces from a series titled "Storms" are painted in a similar palette of blue, green, black, brown and mustard with little bits of red. Some are a complete sea of marks in conflict. Others have balanced zones of antagonism and harmony. One, Storm V, has five distinct horizontal bands of interrelated marks pressing actively against each other. In another abstract painting, Shattered, Hirschl uses brownish-gray, pale yellow and black to create a hazy vision of a burning city. The lovely neutral colors contrast with the sharpness of a few slashes of vivid red. Hirschl is intentionally vague about the connection of these abstract works to actual events: "The Storm paintings focus on my inner war and the confusion within me."

Tamar Hirschl, Mementos (2004, detail), digital print, acrylic and gold leaf on vinyl.

Topical issues and the iconography of violence are more overt in much of Hirschl's newer work, displayed in the second gallery. A Holocaust survivor at age 9, Hirschl lost her father to the camps. But she, her mother and her sister were released from a Hungarian prison and eventually fled to Israel. In an illustrative work like Mementos (2004), she covers a digital print on vinyl with familiar imagery of the Holocaust: eyeglasses, false teeth, shoes, silverware, hair and pieces of broken things. Suggesting one of the odious tattoos of the Nazis, a large number "11060" is painted at the top. The painting shows a sort of abstract vertical structure filled with shrinelike clusters of fetish objects. I couldn't help feeling that the orderly and well-integrated parts of the composition were almost too pleasing to look at, considering the horror of their implications.

Also simultaneously disturbing and visually pleasing, Fall (2003) is a huge digital print on vinyl (105 inches by 196 inches) with collage and painted elements. On a vast bright field of yellow, little things fly around, including a space shuttle, astronauts, people in gas masks, saguaro cacti, a leaf pattern and a strip of faux film across the top with images of a lab, birds and a person on a stretcher.

Other American tragedies appear in nine smaller mixed-media works that deal with the 9/11 attacks. One piece, titled Twin Towers Scroll (2002), is a vertical column of grainy images of firemen, the ruined towers, baseball players, falling figures and flames. The faded coloration and dusty gray-ink transfer are eerily evocative of ashes and charred elements.

After all this emotional intensity, the two sketchbooks in the show are a relief. They focus on memories of positive experiences, and their intimate format suits the work's personal nature. Both are documents of vacation trips to exotic locales drawn in ink, graphite and watercolor on long horizontal paper scrolls. The drawings of real-life people, masks, landscapes and flowers in Papua, New Guinea (2000) are casual and loose, almost awkward. Antarctica (2002) has rather stiff and monotonous views of water, ice, sky and barren hills. Both sketchbooks appear to be made with the wishful thinking of someone who has always lived in places of violence and strife.

Without a doubt Hirschl's life history urgently requires a response in her art, and she has tested several different approaches to the challenge in this exhibition. At this point, the gray, ashy confusion of some of the 9/11 pieces and open-ended, personal nature of the sketchbooks represent two of the more authentic approaches. They are not pretty, but that's as it should be. Life is filled with raw experiences and the urge to understand them. Hirschl works with direct experience rather than stock images of tragedy, and she brings the viewer along in her brave struggle with these painful memories.

While you're at the Art Alliance, be sure to check out Brian David Dennis's massive support-beam sculpture Leaning Keep in the main stairway, and in the second-floor galleries, veteran Magnum photographer Burt Glinn's amazing photographs of Castro's victorious entry into Havana and Clay Studio artist-in-residence Nicholas Arroyave-Portela's colorful ceramic vessels. On the third floor, Samantha Simpson's panoramic wall paintings combine animals, patterns and vivid colors. At the Art Alliance Satellite Gallery at the Rittenhouse Hotel, you can see recent works by local painter Tadashi Moriyama inspired by Japanese calligraphy, manga and fukei painting.

Tamar Hirschl: Fragmented Memories Through Jan. 9, Philadelphia Art Alliance, 251 S. 18th St., 215-545-4302