Excerpt from the Essay by Ada Na’ mani, curator of the Exhibition “Painting Flowers Now” 1992, at the Municipality Art Gallery, City Rehovot, M. Smilansky Cultural Center .
A prolonged encounter with Israeli Art over the past decade drew my attention to the image of flowers in the work of Israeli artists of this period and intrigued me as to what this Image represented.
The paintings of Farideh at the end of 1991 transported me right back 10 years earlier to the “Turning Point” exhibition at Tel Aviv Museum, in which the curator , Sara Breitberg-Semel, defined and analysed a new direction then taking place in the development of Israeli art. Immediately recalled Dvora Schneider’s huge flowers , those apparently naïve giant blossoms which, after a decade of chaste and spartan rationalistic art, aroused in me feelings of wonder. I began to “collect flowers”. When I had finished colleting, I chose 7 artists who , as far as I am concerned, represent what I meant by “Painting Flowers Now”: Tsiby Geva, Farideh, Moshe Gershuni, Dorit Yacoby, Rivka Potcheutzky, Meir Franko, Dvora Schneider.
………. None of these painted blooms has any direct connection with nature, nor are they the result of observing nature. The dialogue which they maintain as visual images is with culture in a broad sense: ……… . In the present exhibition I am trying to show that “Painting Flowers Now” does not mean falling into the ” tramp of simplification ” but, rather, that painting flowers now is still up-to-date, correct, replete with inexhaustible possibilities for in-depth artistic expression, a worthy interlocutor in contemporary Israeli Art.