Cats and Angels

This exhibition is the product of the past four years that Leora Wise has been working in the medium of etching. She has chosen subjects from her immediate surroundings, which bind the commonplace and everyday with mystical other-worldly realms.

Through her depiction of the family cat, Leora Wise examines the subjects of sensuality and femininity. In her desert landscapes and Jerusalem scenes, she portrays the earthly and the spiritual in a conjunction of restrained lines and patches, which is at times realistic and familiar and at others abstract and highly personal. In the third and most recent series, “Goddesses”, she moves from nature to a reflection on female imagery. She infuses the cat symbol into her interpretations of classical images from art history like the Three Graces and Susannah and the Elders. A distinctive use of the metal plate, etched deeply and coarsely over and over again produces dense, even rough prints, which are meant to challenge the aesthetic classical female form.

We see the artist transforming her subjects: the rich intimacy of the reclining cat becomes a portrayal of simple forms. The iconic, miniature Jerusalem landscapes take on both realistic and abstract qualities. There is an attempt to rework the female form as objectified by the masculine gaze and to break with the conventional aesthetic tradition.

The three series of etchings that comprise the exhibition offer a dialogue between the intimate and the mundane, the symbolic and the eternal. It is the artist’s search for her personal voice, etched in the metal plates. Leora Wise: “My first impressions of nature and landscape fade into memory, embedded like artifacts in my etching plates, till finally buried under the subsequent new layers in cycle after cycle of creation and destruction.”