Michal Gavish treats the development of an idea into a work of art as scientific research: seeking something undefined that she feels a strong urge to express, while time and treatment crystalize a form and a solution.

Gavish is comfortable with data, instruments and materials and does not recoil from using a broad range of artistic expressive media from video art to traditional painting.

In her Objectivity exhibition Michal transforms evasive ghosts into presence exhibiting them as concrete substance. The process which lasted for two years started in Budapest, moved to Leipzig and San-Francisco and landed in Jaffa.

Lack of relatives, shortage of stories and the multi-year preoccupation with the family biography erupted into an idea for an art project when she stayed in Budapest during 2010. An “artist scholarship” that took her back to her father’s birth town and her inhabitance in an art center near his childhood house, urged her to specifically concentrate on her origins. Using a handful of family portrait photos Gavish decided to expand the tiny faces and provide them with painted bodies, clothes and context. The next phase was to introduce the paper images to their hometown. Suspended from huge rods, Gavish and five other artists paraded the images around Budapest’s Jewish quarter. The paper, its contact with the wind, the translucent images visiting their birthplace, became video-art and still pictures.

Gavish later moved to work in Leipzig in an apartment that also served as a studio. The giant images hanging around the apartment demanded a home. Gavish complied and redrew them on transparent fabric and endowed them with a home on canvas: chair, sofa, dresser, picture frame. Now, drawn on two layers she took them out for a stroll in the forests surrounding Leipzig where many of Budapest’s Jews transported to Buchenwald found short-lived refuge. Gavish created an installation where the frame painted on one layer and the images painted on a second layer were hung on a wall with the forest-stroll projected establishing a third layer. Thus she created a family legend, yet another imagined biographical layer to the family she never met.

When invited to exhibit at San Francisco’s Sandra-Lee gallery, specializing in painting, Gavish had to transfer her materials. The Leipzig forest video art became painting. The Budapest images reached their new US residence hanging in their full length and transparency in reconstructed rooms, with the forests, painted on canvas in the second layer commemorating their end. When displayed in the US the images reached decent alternative lives under the clouds of their past.

In the Jaffa exhibition the images’ biographies lose their significance. Gavish now paints all: images, room details, forests. Lacking a concrete installation, the images go through a metamorphosis and achieve eternal lives. The ghosts are real and complete, like the canvas, acrylic and graphite. They are material devoid of memory, catastrophe and absence. As in scientific research when material is placed under the microscope, it loses its initial form becoming contextless and different and great.

Closing: 14.10.12