Page 62 - Gary Goldstein_Catalog final

Foreword
Gary Goldstein’s exhibition Well Being
touches the raw nerves of Israeli society,
which are especially sensitive to the memories
of Holocaust survivors and their children.
Displayed on one side of the gallery are small
drawings on paper in the style of comics, which
feature portraits of women as well as body
parts, drops of blood, bisected whales, and
flowers uprooted from the soil. On the other
side of the gallery, the artist has situated works
combined with texts that bespeak various
forms of distress, anxiety, and memories of
a childhood in the shadow of spent parents.
These texts appear in the gallery space in the
form of a sound work by Etty BenZaken.
There exists a stark contrast the artist, the which provide us each with some sense of
man with the soft, quiet voice appearing in the
video work in the gallery foyer, and between the
works exuding violence, longing for a female
figure, and distress that provokes an ambiguous
sense of suffocation. This contrast reminds us
all of repression and its price among Holocaust
survivors and their children.
Indeed, the schoolchildren who visited the
exhibition internalized the power of art and
the importance of art-making as both a creative
act and a therapeutic process, which provides
the artist with some psychological relief.
The exhibition marks the transformation
of painting into an act of well-being,
which – alongside additional, necessary
actions – enables the artist to survive the
everyday. In addition, it attends to the sense
of wonder that the artist feels when observing
the finished works, which contain unconscious
elements, memories and emotions that
surfaced during the creative process.
The exhibition was planned to close at the
end of March 2020. Due to the COVID-19 crisis,
however, it is now inaccessible to the public,
and its official closing date remains unknown
at this time. Like Gary Goldstein, today more
than ever we are all in need of our daily rituals,
well-being.
I thank Shira Friedman and the staff of
the Schechter Gallery for this excellent and
inspiring exhibition, and hope we will soon
return to the gallery and to ourselves.
Romina Reisin
Director, Neve Schechter
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