Both Sides | Gabriella Klein
Curator: Dr. Ziva Jelin
The title of Gabriella Klein’s exhibition at the Be’eri Gallery in Tel-Aviv-Jaffa is taken from Joni Mitchell’s iconic song Both Sides Now, where Mitchell reflects on clouds, love, and life from both their sides, questioning whether they are illusions or simply misunderstood.
Gabriella Klein presents a dual and indefinite state, pointing more to the artist’s perspective than the painted object, how she views and interprets the world, and what remains unseen. She deals with what she sees, painting and drawing the people closest to her – her family – over the years. During the COVID-19 lockdown, with everyone confined at home, Klein would wake up before her family and draw them as they slept, read, or watched their phones or TV. These drawings became a meditative practice, done in blind contour, rarely looking at the paper, spontaneously – allowing the hand to follow the eye. She captures them in moments of rest, portraying them in a non-active state.
When she observes her family – the people closest to her – she sees them as a pictorial object. There is always a subtle distance between her and them. One can never fully know all that they are thinking or feeling inside. This notion is absurd: not knowing those closest to her. Her choice to paint them while they rest or sleep is intentional, capturing a state that simultaneously conveys calm serenity and underlying anxiety and vulnerability. The vulnerability stems from their defenselessness in sleep, the one place where every person is utterly alone, immersed in their dreams and inner world, separated from everything happening outside them. Observing a sleeping figure creates an inherent distance for the observer, as though separated by an invisible wall.She continued this practice beyond the pandemic, with her family becoming her most familiar models – at once, deeply personal and profoundly universal – both close and distant, teetering between the intimate and the estranged. Some of the drawings evolved into oil paintings.
In her paintings, Gabriella Klein primarily constructs fragmented compositions – pieces of body and objects: the cropped legs of the artist in shorts, a man’s arm resting on a bed sheet, the revealed neckline of a blue work garment with a zipper, a fragment of a red plaid shirt, a duvet resembling a cloud, a girl curled into a fetal position, enclosed within a stapled frame. She creates broken fragments that flatten the painting out of a profound awareness of the medium’s flatness and the tradition of painting itself. The surfaces are constructed by layering heavy paint, caressing at times, that creates an uneven, jumbled texture, found undersurface, and at the same time, reducing details to a minimum and leaving plenty of empty space, painted in a single color that shrouds the characters, revealing and concealing them, holding them in place, and sometimes compressing them within the painting’s frame.
The characters sometimes sleep or stare into space, contemplating, daydreaming, unknowingly giving in to the artist’s gaze. They are never active, nor do they meet the viewer’s gaze. The only one fully awake and looking is the mother – the painter – whose awareness is revealed in the sharpness of the doubled figures drawn with an ink marker on the wall. In the external window niche outside the gallery, a man and a woman are painted; she faces the viewer while he is depicted from behind. Connected by a shared blanket, they form a single body, each facing a different direction – right and left, front and back – two sides, both together and apart.
In I am an Island, Klein’s artist book (2021), Itamar Levy wrote:
Beauty is diluted with loneliness. Bodies are moving away. Each person is an island… Familial proximity is diluted with separateness. Back to back. Side to side. The dreams are integrated and separated. A world above the surface and the dream world are also a world of self-forgetfulness and acute self-awareness, belonging and loneliness, or maybe more accurately – a moment of magic where all worlds meet.”