Photo Credit: Andi Arnovitz
Andi Arnovitz’s current art show is a beautiful conflation of color and expressions of political turmoil. A progressive, feminist artist based in Israel, Arnovitz captivates her audience with paintings that are both enlightening and unnerving. Threatened Beauty ’is the title of her new exhibition, which is on display until January 2016 at the Yeshiva University Museum in downtown Manhattan. The exhibition features thirty-three exquisitely crafted collages depicting Middle Eastern tumult and religious tradition. Her colors are bright, bold, and riddled with threatening imagery. Thus, the juxtaposition within the title of the show is most fitting.
In one piece, “8,000 Books,” Arnovitz uses jewellike watercolors, collage, threads, and pages from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, to document ISIS’s violent campaign to destroy the libraries in the northern Iraqi city, Mosul.
Arnovitz combines political turmoil with art, in an abstract sense, evoking fear and thoughts about the future. Kundera’s book holds a deep, personal meaning for Arnovitz, and this particular book acts as a surrogate for the many manuscripts depicted in the piece. These manuscripts, worth thousands of years of tradition, are reduced to ashes. Book burnings, which are relevant to the Jewish experience in Nazi Germany, are also recognized as a sign of metaphoric genocide, and the deliberate control and decimation of one culture over another.
An artist of exceptional acumen, Arnovitz personally tore up Kundera’s novel, one of her favorites, to place herself within the angst of the upheaval.
The plaque accompanying this piece reads, in Arnovitz’s own words, “A passage towards the end of Kundera’s book still haunts me with its clarity, even 31 years after first reading it. Bits and pieces of this passage have been sewn into the tiny books in this work; words from it are floating in the background: ‘…and to keep up with events, to leave none of them out, its pace growing faster and faster, until finally the Grand March is a procession of rushing, galloping people and the platform is shrinking and shrinking until one day it will be reduced to a mere dimensionless dot.’”
In another piece, “Ecclesiastes 3:19,” a collage crafted with watercolor, Arnovitz elaborates on the Biblical verse, where she cites, “Man’s fate is that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal. Everything is meaningless.” The piece presents all of her original work, in fragments, deteriorating into dissolution and destruction.
As a female artist and self-proclaimed Jewish Orthodox feminist, Arnovitz excels in her talent. Her work reflects a myriad of fears, including the threat of a nuclear Iran, and a cause dear to her heart–women’s rights. There is a sense of empowerment that shows in her work, as she is enthusiastically painting the female struggle, depicting it with pain, yet refusing to let that female voice become silent.
As a woman, her art demonstrates the challenges, myths, and expectations of women in today’s society. The struggle she depicts opens a conversation about the women’s issues she is striving to portray, and raises awareness about the feminist cause.
As quoted in an article on JewishArtSalon.com, Arnovitz says that her works in Threatened Beauty “reflect this tension, the majestic beauty, the riot of color, the magnificent decoration, the meticulous craftsmanship…There is a kind of terrible beauty here, a paradox, a collision of the past and the present, good and evil, a looking forwards and backwards all at the same time.”
Arnovitz’s artistry is intertwined with personal inflections and sensitive messages. Messages of pain and destruction resonate in the pieces, “Heavy Water,” “The Tipping Point,” “Thirteen Boys,” and more. Arnovitz’s gift includes a sentimental ability to present harsh realities and moral issues with heartfelt grace and clarity.