GALIA EIBENSCHUTZ

She is also a close observer of the natural world, with an attentive gaze that ranges from the smallest detail to the vastest expanse, from the micro to the macro, from the germinal to the fully developed. Eibenschutz has turned walking through the forest, immersed in the landscape, into an artistic practice. Through her performative work, she imagines the world from the condition of being a plant, as a way of understanding nature from a less anthropocentric position. This practice resonates, visually and bodily, with the ideas of philosopher Emanuele Coccia, who presents this reflection in his book The Cosmic Garden.

This exhibition brings together the imaginary (the body of images) that Galia Eibenschutz has recently created, in which energy, nature—inseparable from humankind—and an approach that expands the genre of landscape toward a representation of the inner forces of the natural world converge.

Her paintings and drawings embody an intimate relationship between art and the environment, with an impeccable reference point in The Metamorphosis of Plants, Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s treatise on representation, in which he proposes that painters look closely at nature and afterwards, with eyes closed, seek its representation in motion. The aim is to go beyond natural forms and capture what he called Urpflanze: a blueprint of the archetypal plant and of the vital energy that transforms the seed into a fully formed organism.

Eibenschutz’s works are the pictorial manifestation of a communion between the artist’s physical impetus before the canvas and Goethean Urpflanze, born of her walks through the forest and of her encounter with “that which cannot be seen in nature,” in the artist’s own words. It is precisely at this threshold between the representation of the natural world and the energy shared by Galia Eibenschutz and nature, as well as in the force of images that transcend abstraction and also overflow figuration, that these paintings and drawings rise in all their luminous beauty.

Text by Carlos E. Palacios. Courtesy Galería RGR