Fanny Horowitz is an Israeli artist who lives in Tel Aviv.
She studied classical painting with the artist Hagit Shahal in 2007–2013.
She has taken part in group exhibitions.
This is her first solo show – which is being held at the Ephrat Gallery, May 2–May 23, 2013

The Curator – Amili Gelbman

Quote: “I’m searching for that moment, that moment of grace, so I immortalize something from the world around me on canvas. It existed for a moment, existed and disappeared…” Fanny Horowitz

Fanny Horowitz is a figurative painter – she converses with objects. One can see a reorganization of world orders evolving in her paintings, based on feelings and a perception of space that has an emotional regularity.

Her studio is replete with objects that we see in the works displayed in the exhibition.

Thus, in preparation for a new painting, she examines and positions these inanimate objects in a meticulous and precise order – the decorative pillows, the thin porcelain bowls, the antique coffee cup with pure gold that was passed down in the family.
That intense red color that belongs to the soft velvet from an antique armchair.
The “peep toe” high heels that bring the symbolism and the feminine intimacy with them, and that bracelet she received from her husband on the day her youngest daughter was born.

She photographs these objects during the first hour of daylight, chooses the angles, as well as the encounter between the falling light and the depth of the shadows.

Fanny draws inspiration from the intense colors of Matisse’s Fauvism and from the Impressionist movement – the visual psychology of the “complementary colors”. The artistic movement which has a theory of color that examines how colors are emotionally perceived by the observer. The most important source of influence for the Impressionist painters was the theory of light developed by Michel Eugene Chevreul, who is quoted as saying: “because no color appears exactly as it is when juxtaposed to another color.”

Fanny gets a lot of inspiration from the artist Berthe Morisot, 1841–1895 (“Salon de Paris” – Morisot is the only bold female artist among the group of Impressionist painters)

Quote: “Like the Impressionists, I take a special interest in light. In the way it bounces back from the different objects. In the special colors that are formed by these reflections of light – a different light creates a different colorfulness. That’s why the white porcelain bowls…are not white on the canvas”. Fanny Horowitz

As to the works in the current exhibition, there’s a sense that processes which apply to the objects – those very same everyday objects – actually apply in spirit, unrelated to the attributes of the objects themselves. So the object becomes a subject.
She instills a soul in them, enjoys examining and looking at them again from a new angle, and finding herself in them for some moments. That same dimension of a simple and everyday object undergoes a transformation, and turns into an object belonging to another world.
She allows herself to fix the experience firmly inside the walls of the protective studio, and using paintbrushes laden with thick oil colors, she mixes endless shades and sub–shades inside small cans. And thus the process she undergoes in each new work entails penetrating deep inner worlds. The pursuit of composition, and identifying a proper balance which produces that great wealth of harmony – unity found in a sensory, sensual and instinctive world, with a new language of symbols and rules.

Those moments of grace – are an escape from a noisy outside world to a tranquil one, diving into the depths until losing a sense of external time and place, entering and observing inner emotional worlds and landscapes – searching for a lock that opens a door to spiritual sustenance.

 

Amili Gelbman