A Vision of Wonder: The Art of Gayle Sharabi

Ghostly forms fill the canvases and drawings created by Israeli-American artist Gayl Sharabi.  These forms, shown in thickly painted outlines barely separable from the ground that surrounds them, reveal themselves to be contours of women, of bottles, and of women in bottles.  Devoid of any architectural or dimensional clues, the space these contours occupy is not suggestive of any physical reality.  Instead, it’s a space of the mind, constructed entirely and exclusively of the parched pigments and rough, arid surfaces found throughout her art. 

Sharabi’s are clearly deeply personal and subjective expressions.  They show a state of mind that lives in the imagination, but not the imagination of dreams and fantasies.  Instead, she shows us the imagination that wonders about human life from its day-to-day specifics to the larger questions of what it means to be alive.  Through her art, she shares her own internal dialog in purely visual form and invites us to become part of this wondering.