6 March - 9 April 2009

Images of Sculpture and Installations

The Boundary Gallery had never mounted an exhibition featuring photography. However, having seen Gitl's Braun's work, I was so impressed by its painterly, sculptural and spiritual qualities, that there was no doubt in my mind that I was looking at a major talent. This was her first major solo exhibition in London.

I first met Gitl Braun over 28 years ago when she was still totally immersed with child rearing. It came as a total surprise that she had become an artist after training at St. Martin's School of Art where she graduated in 2006. Since then she has devoted herself with intense dedication and determination to producing an outstanding collection of works.
Gitl Braun makes sculptures and installations, photographs them, and the work continues afterwards with great intensity when she decides what to discard, how to crop, how to enhance in order to improve the image. She is a perfectionist.
She works in series. One of this, that lasted a year, is based on an early 19th century Neapolitan set of puppets - dilapidated, with signs of age…Take the close-up photograph of the blackened, bronze like head of Ruth filling the picture space, stark and bold as an African carved statue. She creates other characters from these puppets, or their fragments, based on the Old Testament stories - fairytales were not allowed in the orphanage in Jerusalem where she grew up.
Her other series consists of sculpture created from textiles - silk, chiffon and other textiles, old and new. She creates amazing sculptural reliefs with the fabrics, photographs and then disposes of them, "leaving the image of a memory, the memory of an image". These photographs transform into erotic forms, floral shapes, beautiful ethereal abstract compositions. She describes this as letting the fabrics perform.
Her latest series of images focus on a painter's palette that belonged to a restorer - so there is art history attached, as well as an optimistic step into the future - she celebrates by introducing, for the first time, strong sensuous, and vibrant colours. The sculptural aspect is retained and enhanced by the thick impasto built up on the palette over many decades.

….The painterly sheen of the photographs reflects her own emotional restoration after many dark introspective years ……. in which Braun defines a contemporary artistic language distilled from surrealism, abstraction, minimalism, conceptualism into an idiom entirely her own. Jackie Wullschlager

Coinciding with the show at the Boundary Gallery, there was an exhibition Sacred at the London Jewish Cultural Centre displaying 15 of her religious works - including photographs of 500 years old Hebrew manuscripts and prayer books that survived two world wars.

Agi Katz

A 48 page fully illustrated 300 x 210 mm catalogue is available with an Introduction by Jackie Wullschlager, author of several books, most recently the much acclaimed "Chagall, Love and Exile" (Allen Lane), shortlisted for the 2008 Costa Biography of the Year and the 2008 Duff Cooper Prize