In a shared exhibition of paintings, artists Chanchal Banga and Ruth Norman address the bridge enabling passage between two disjoint places, as a connecting symbol between cultures. The loss of sensation due to the driving speed, heavy concrete pillars grasping the ground and supporting a hovering road, the division of road and time according to the bridges she already crossed, are just a few of the stimuli that drove Norman, an Israeli artist preoccupied by scenery, to paint bridges. Using oil colors on Duplex paper, Norman bestows upon the bridge the status of a temple with monumental pillars dwarfing anyone standing under them, a location in the heart of the scenery, symmetry between supports, perfect proportions, and perspective into the distance. The bridges in her paintings become a magnificent frame, a boundary for the scenery paintings. Norman is punctilious with the bridge details using a thick brush and broad strokes on one hand, letting go and blurring the scenery on the other. Thus, the bridges vanishing from the eye in the high speed traffic are transformed in her work into colossal presences taking over the elegant fragile scenery, contrary to reality.

Banga, born in India and creating in Israel over the last fourteen years, grasps the bridge from all its cultural ends. From the artistic end, he appropriates the Impressionists’ bridge images of Paris, Argenteuil, and Giverny; in the other, Israeli end, he adopts the image from his many travels on highway-one to the airport and from the ugly bridge constructed in front of his eyes at Jerusalem’s Holy-Land, and in the last end, from bridges in India where life and death depend on the bridge, and therefore prior to its construction sacrifices are offered for good luck. Banga links the bridge to the fantastic. In ink and water colors on paper he creates a flowing union, soft and enlightening between the bridge and the organic limbs of humans and beasts. Banga’s bridges are the opposite of Norman’s grandeur, they float delicately in the center of the page, holding nothing and become a contextless, autonomous living entity. Banga’s realist supporting point is at once transformed into distinct surrealist wholeness.
Norman-Banga’s bridges are a perfect remarkable synthesis of opposite observations in space, in its messages, and attributes and hence the opposite complementing expressive ways.

Gallery talk:​ 16.05.15 | at 11:00

Closing:​ 30.05.15