untitled Painting

Danielle Feldhaker, living and working in Tel Aviv. Born in the USA in 1982. I currently work predominantly with painting in mixed media on Plexiglas, wood and canvas, and with installations that focus on the seam between painting and sculpture. I strive to create images that range from the figurative world to the abstract, and am interested in motifs of beauty and chaos and how these can produce a new aesthetic space. Furthermore, I aspire to bring street art and the urban space into the private and personal space, into inner walls, and form a relationship between the inside and the outside, between soft and hard. I usually paint with acrylics, spray paint and markers, with large and wide brushes that allow space, rhythm and movement. The painting surfaces also vary and include large scale canvases, wooden pallets, plywood, found wood panels, and recently mostly Plexiglas. My work is not only painting-based, but is also collagist in nature, incorporating PVC and working with textures of molding paste and different paints. The works' point of departure is an expression of a mood and a feeling. I go back time and time again to the same external subjects, examining them in different formalistic manners and from a different awareness. The works are born from a physical movement and a changing temperament. The focus and concentration change from day to day and from painting to painting, like an unpredictable dance, but with the same partner. In a number of exhibitions I have shown recently, my emphasis was on creating a painting installation and examining the relation between the paintings and their influence on the activation of the space. This was also manifested in my approach to any format that examines the boundaries of the medium within itself (the surface, the transparency, and the language of the painting), as well as in approach to the entire assembly which produces a type of a "painting installation". In my earlier works, I drew inspiration from the urban landscape, including the graffiti on the walls and the urban "landscape" that glimpses through the concrete screens. In these works, there is tension between figurative images and abstract splashes of paint. The traces of the brush function as an echo of the buildings of the city, a residue of the urban mass, the perpetual construction, destruction, growth, withering, vitality and death that exist in it.