FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Ginette Mizraki
Illumination: Gold Series
October 23 – December 10, 2004
Opening: Sunday, October 24, 2004 2:00- 5:00pm; Artist talk: 3:00pm
Concert of music inspired and composed for this series: Sunday, November 21, 2004 3:00pm
USC Hillel Foundation, 3300 Hoover Street, Los Angeles, CA 90007
Telephone: (213) 747-9135, ext. 14
E-mail, <mizrakig@aol.com>
Web site, <http://www.uschillel.org>
Gallery Hours: Monday – Friday 9:00-5:00pm
Ginette Mizraki, "Amoris Foedere"
Illumination: Gold Series, is comprised of an ordered set of 36 abstract paintings. An attached number of semicircles, rectangles and triangles form a structure that, with each progressive pair of six larger paintings, descends and gradually disappears from the surface, as the background becomes the luminescent foreground itself, evoking the Kabbalah and alchemy. Twenty-four accompanying smaller works, painted in relation to the paired couples, are the progenies that make up the whole dynamic. The work explores the process of transformation, through relationships of paint, color, texture and rhythm, presented in rich, visual abstractions of sensual and quixotic allure. Layered skins of diaphanous color and embedded markings create surfaces that suggest time, as in music, and movement in space, as objects fall away in an expanding universe. There is a certain religiosity that transpires in the invitation to experience each individual painting/particle and the whole.
Born and raised in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), Ginette Mizraki was educated in England at the Royal Academy of Music, where she studied speech and drama. It was in Israel, however, while active in the theater, television, and teaching that the artist began to draw and paint in earnest. Moved by both her own inner landscape and imagination, and inspired by Jerusalem, its surrounding hills and ever-changing light, Mizraki began to draw in pen and ink and pastels, gradually combining gentle washes of watercolor. She eventually began working in gouache and acrylic. Her works have been exhibited since 1972 in South Africa, Israel, Belgium, and the United States, and are in collections in those countries, as well as in Canada, England, France.
Multilingual and world-traveled, Ginette Mizraki avails herself of the diverse cultural experiences (African, English, European, Sephardic, Turkish, Israeli) which inform her life. She says, "Art should be without barriers. It is the viewer who informs the work, and must take it home and make it what is already his or her own."
