Closed TAKI

5th exhibition in the 20th Nidbach series.

Playfulness runs throughout Gal Breier’s exhibition “Closed TAKI,” whose title refers to an Israelideveloped card game. A black checkered pattern recurs in many of the paintings, with colorful dentate forms arranged on it, possibly branches, possibly hands, perhaps parts of a jigsaw puzzle. Breier’s painterly sphere is the domestic sphere: the realm of leisure, play and intimacy, but also the domain of distress and suffocation. Some of the works portray, in vivid colors, interiors rife with surfaces and vegetation, populated by women/girls alongside exotic animals. The paintings allude to a tradition of Orientalist fantasies, which are also fantasies about femininity. The protagonist of the fantasy is a girl-woman, dreaming and playing; at the same time, the paintings also expose the solitude of one locked up in a castle, and the yearning to escape therefrom.