Daniella Sheinman: String Line

At the outset of her artistic career, Daniella Sheinman created colorful figurative paintings, but over the years, her paintings became monochromatic and free. Most of the works in the current exhibition are executed in black graphite on large-scale raw white canvases. They express the unique, personal and impressive language that the artist has developed during the past two decades – a language that is abstract, yet at the same time firmly constructed and meticulously designed. In contrast to the works in graphite, the art Sheinman has created in recent years on large sheets of paper is indeed spontaneous. The works were executed within a short time frame with direct, immediate motions on the paper that was hanging on the wall. The entire exhibition, including its name, was created under a musical inspiration. Sheinman has played the piano since childhood, and her creative work in the studio is always accompanied by listening to music, which both provides inspiration for the painting and dictates her working rhythm. Daniella Sheinman’s works do not focus on a particular period of her life but rather move between various occurrences from various times. Through the paintings, one can discern a philosophy of life transmitted from an individualistic perspective, and out of this worldview, the artist tries to put on the canvas, in each and every painting, life in its entirety and not in fragments. Thus, each painting seeks to give plastic expression to experiences of the soul that Sheinman accumulated over the course of her life. Sheinman’s riveting creation fundamentally carries dual meaning: On one hand, her abstract language and creative process radiate emotional and intellectual restraint, while on the other hand, the works arouse in the viewer tempests and emotions concealed in the flickering black lines on the raw canvases and transparent rolls like notes played on a keyboard from a musical score in black and white. Out of the wide array of major solo exhibitions over the years – both in Israel and internationally – in which Sheinman presented graphite paintings on raw white canvas, it is worth noting the huge two- or three-dimensional installations shown in her two solo exhibitions at the Haifa Museum: “Expulsion from Paradise” (1994) and “Venus Rising from the Sea” (1997), in the exhibition “Interior Space” at Bayerische Vereinsbank in Frankfurt (1996) and also at Sotheby’s in Tel Aviv (1998), in the exhibition “Meanings of Life” at the Ludwig Museum of Modern Art in Koblenz, Germany (1999) , in the exhibition “A Journey into the Depths of Dreams” at the Museum of Israeli Art in Ramat Gan, Israel (2002), and in the monumental exhibition “A Line of Tohu” (2009) at The Open Museum, Tefen Industrial Park. Daniella Talmor, former chief curator, Haifa Museum of Art