Carmit Gil - Mandalas
Expositions > Arts plastiques
Du 29 octobre au 07 janvier 2006

Roundabouts – Carmit Gil’s Mandalas

In Mandalas, her second solo show at galerie frank elbaz (oct 2005) the young Israeli artist Carmit Gil brings together a few ancient traditions of working with circles, with these early modernist attempts to harness it to its geometrical abstraction and proto-mechanical tendencies. Her new series of painted aluminum and fiberglass flat objects draw from and connect different systems of aesthetics: product design (car plate, tooth), religious and spiritual traditions (church murals, Tibetan mandala), street furniture (tree grills, sewer covers), astronomy and star gazing (moon, galaxy and stars).
In Mandalas Gil continues to work on some of the questions she began in her previous projects. Here again she confronts the relation between flat and three dimensional objects, and the possibility of working today with and against traditions of ornamentation, issues that were the focus of her work Carpet gallery (galerie frank elbaz, 2004). Once again she takes on “street design”, a subject she began tackling in her drawings of sewer covers and staircases (2002-03). Yet in Mandalas she pays closer attention to the patterns themselves. Alongside geometrical and abstract ornaments, Gil examines the filtration of the natural (flowers, stars) and the symbolic or even supernatural (Stars of David, crosses, crescents, and, of course, the circle itself) into aesthetics of everyday life. Once again, as she did with her Bus, a large sculpture she presented at the 2003 Venice Biennale, by emptying her objects from all superfluous visual information, Gil allows us to pay closer attention to the objects we tend to miss, even though they are what our eyes meets most, every day, all around.

Gilad Melzer

galerie frank elbaz
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