Gali Fleischmann

GALINA FLEISCHMANNOVÁ is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague where she studied painting under Professor František Jiroudek. Her paintings have been exhibited both in Slovakia and abroad, and she has been awarded numerous prizes. She has long combined her extensive artistic work with her teaching activities. She is a permanent member of the C+S art collective.

The exhibition features Fleischmannová’s cycle of paintings titled VERONIKA’S VEILS – THE VERA ICON, which she created during the period of her mother’s serious illness. As the artist recalls, “… it was the only outlet for my feelings of powerlessness and my fears for a loved one. For me, Veronika’s Veils are an image of pain, suffering and faith in a miraculous recovery”.

The collection of twelve paintings maps out a process which played out in a period in which a close personal relationship was transformed into a struggle for survival, a fight against time; one which we already know did not end happily. The mutual processes which are depicted are full of tenderness and the most intimate of moments… the realization that the end is approaching. The starting point for the narrative is the painting titled MUMMY, a portrait with a gentle smile which emphasizes the beauty of the subject’s hands. As the cycle develops, the artist abandons her characteristic classical painterly techniques and switches to the medium of paper. These works are monochromatic, restrained, still; they soothe away the pain and openly reveal their traces of love and sympathy. For Fleischmannová, the paper becomes a kind of skin – a sensitive bearer of emotion, a tool of introspection, a record of mutual contact, pain, yet also of hope. She perforates the medium, crumples it mercilessly, layering, stitching, tearing and repairing the paper. She marks its surface with gestural testimonies, imprints of paint, collage and assemblage. It is something more than a mere portrait or a likeness of her mother but reaches for something deeper – to grasp the essence of her soul. In this sense, the cycle recalls Adriena Šimotová’s work Head, an exploration of the potential of paper which touches on similar themes: existence, transience, corporeality, the foreboding of shadows. The two artists’ works are creative meditations on the forms of existence, on what remains when the body disappears.

The mother is a child’s earliest universe. Security. The child has no conception of where they end and where their mother begins. This is the purest SYMBIOSIS, a state in which one cannot survive without the other. The daughter sees her own origins in the mother but also the fate which awaits her. This reciprocal bond is like a breath – the inhalation of life, the exhalation of departure. A confrontation with one’s own mortality but also with a deep sense of gratitude. Galina Fleischmannová’s VERA ICON is a cycle of love in which roles can change while essentially remaining the same: to be here for one another. That most tender of reversals – the daughter becomes “mother” to the woman who brought her into the world.

Edita Vološčuková, project curator