Curator: Tal Yahas
"Galia Pasternak Painting + Drawing" - this inscription appears on a business card held by the artist's likeness in one of the drawings she has created over the past year. The fact that these two mediums, painting and drawing, receive equal status in her eyes is relatively new; until recently, her exhibitions mainly featured paintings on canvas, while her drawings usually served as preparatory sketches or were stashed away. This is the first exhibition in which Pasternak presents a comprehensive body of works on paper - mostly small-format drawings and several paper collages.
While Pasternak's paintings are created on a grandiose scale, and demonstrate a virtuoso control of various techniques and styles, her drawings are lighter, at times even unrestrained. They are reminiscent of happy, naïve, loosely drawn scrawls that are not committed to "good" painting. These images are motivated by experiences of wandering and gathering images in the urban sphere, as well as images culled from the realm of memories or dreams. They depict intimate, everyday scenes, many of which are autobiographical, and frequetly contain the artist's figure. Most of the situations describe moments of excitement, embarrassment, shame or absurd events; some of them resemble small, private rituals concealed behind closed doors. These images are all translated into small formats resembling snapshots. Pasternak does not attempt to reconstruct these scenes realistically, and the memories of the events themselves are mixed with figments of her imagination - the colors, smells and sounds that they evoke; all of these are embodied in a colorful palette characterized by excess, and are sometimes distinguished by a focus on decorative details.
Pasternak enjoys flirting with perversions, naughty acts and even malice; yet this is kind of malice typical of the voyeur, who exposes the truth embodied in a grotesque or absurd moment usually concealed or repressed in the unconscious. These are moments shaped by unbridled desire, self-pleasure, embarrassing acts or a sense of terrible loneliness. Their very representation on paper amounts to a confessional act - a confession concerning the embarrassment or pain embodied in the situations themselves, as well as the artist's admission of her voyeuristic tendencies and consciously cynical use of those charged and revelatory moments.