SHULAMIT KOPF
After many years of painting landscapes, Shulamit Kopf discovered the alchemy of intuition and paint in abstract art. Curiosity drives her in
a constant search. Kopf revels in the freedom provided by abstract art to ask the question “I wonder what will happen if…”. Her work is visually tactile with texture that is intricate and dense. Her choices and improvisations are mostly subconscious with an enthusiasm for experimenting with new materials and techniques.
Kopf celebrates color, but also works in whites, grays and blacks or various shades of ochre.
But even those will often flash a brazen spot of burgundy or blue.
Most of the works here were created for a solo exhibition, “Moscow to Berlin, My mother’s Journey,” to be shown in Israel in April through May 2019 and then in Krakow, Poland, June-August 2019. The mostly monochromatic works are based on Kopf’s mother’s experience as a Polish soldier in the Soviet army through the battles and bombardments of World War II. The mother reached Berlin when there was still fighting from street to street. Throughout the war Kopf’s mother wrote dozens of letters to her parents, exiled in Siberia, and it is those letters that form the basis of the exhibition. Kopf uses her mother’s letters and photographs embedding them in textured layers of paint and mixed media in a process of creation and erasure.
“The work is visceral and painful, torn fragments of the mother’s words buried in the folds of time awaiting the scraping of the palate knife to emerge.
This powerful, yet aesthetic series where stories within stories unfold, sheds light on an aspect that has not yet been explored, making it a unique voice in the continuum of art on the Holocaust.
The work is visceral and painful, torn fragments of the mother’s words buried in the folds of time awaiting the scraping of the palate knife to emerge.”