In her series Zoom In Danish artist Camilla Blachmann exhibits impressions from her visits to Israel. Blachmann, creating in Copenhagen – the remote, rich, cosmopolitan, northern city, does not document Israel as an occasional tourist but rather weaves a dialogue on interrelationships, prejudice and generalization.

Since she does not paint while travelling, cultural differences, colors, people, language and the feeling of home are highlighted in her work. Immigrants, surfers, religious Jews, couples in the street, a house on Nahmani street, Tel Aviv’s Herzl street, a field in the valley of Ysrael, flipflops in a restaurant, abandon their geographic context and become fragments of memory trapped in the canvas. Familiar images, daily routines often transparent to the local eye, become Blachmann’s central topic, always against a Middle-Eastern ornamental background. The decorative tile, the dome, the Ottoman arch, the streetlamp, the oleander, are challenged in the Nordic landscape where Blachmann works and become a surprising background.

Blachmann paints with liquid ink on hand-made paper and in oil on stretched canvases. An image created on non-industrial, inaccurate, organic paper, changes its connotation when painted on framed, articulate, disciplined canvas. By applying this ploy between foreign and familiar in both imagery and technique Blachmann unites all worlds, bridges all gaps, solves all conflicts. She exhibits the universal wisdom of a passing stranger.

Closing: 22.06.13