Chinese bag on her head Painting

Arlene Amaler-Raviv’s artistic trajectory spans four decades of dedication and prolific output, with numerous exhibitions locally and internationally. Her paintings hang in many private and public art collections throughout the world. Bringing them together for a retrospective exhibition would be well-earned recognition for the artist as well as a rewarding curatorial feat. A retrospective would track the painter’s creative journey from the intimate to the “other”; from her early portraits of “People Around Me”, under the tuition of Robert Hodgins, the colourful yet moody “Women and Interiors”, where whole areas of the picture start being effaced, painted over, concealing and revealing emptiness, silence and absences with poignant eloquence, through to the later paintings that move outwards focusing on urban alienation and struggle. Historical turning points amplify the theme of urban alienation: the fall of the Iron Curtain, the end of Apartheid, the collapse of Wall Street, the uprising of Tahrir Square… At such junctures, major changes occur rapidly: the walls of segregation get demolished, world views collide, markets collapse, unemployment mushrooms, refugees are attacked, strikers are shot… This is a male world of power and control, violence and oppression, greed and exploitation. Gestures of erasure are recurrent in Amaler-Raviv’s paintings. They are laid bare, in all their raw vulnerability and honesty, as markers of change and transience. Like the rolled up bedding of a refugee, some canvases accompany the artist from studio to studio. These are re-worked over a period of years, with whole areas disappearing under a coat of black paint and new images appearing in their place. Unlike the painstakingly recorded drawings and erasures in William Kentridge’s epic films, Amaler-Raviv’s palimpsests in paint leave no record of their ephemeral incarnations. Only a forensic art restorer would be able to glimpse their traces under X-ray examination and even then it might be futile to exhume. This existential consciousness is distilled in the iconic “walking man” who appears, in different guises, throughout Amaler-Raviv’s oeuvre. A man steps out into the world, walks bravely into the urban tumult, alone in the crowd, follows the signs, the red beacons, the road markers, walking past the graffiti and billboards, on his personal mission.