New Work

&   O L D E R   W O R K   R A R E L Y   S E E N

In times of horror and global insanity, how can an artist in full conscience celebrate life?

Doubt as to purpose and use of time and energy is what wakes me daily; guilt regarding my comfort and freedom plagues me. How can one possibly consider new creativity when so much suffering riddles the world?

And yet, the power of art can raise the spirit.

Amidst this bleakness, I struggle with beginning something new. I know that once again an image will emerge to include and transcend the present. Trust the process. Something of consequence will be stroked into life.

………………….

Paintings shown here were all created during International Painter’s Symposia in Turkey, Hungary and Slovakia respectively. They deal with exploration of what is concealed and revealed as layers of life and experience open new worlds of knowledge and possibility.

Illuminated, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 50″ x 50″
Pintek Collection, Dunjaska Strada. Slovakia

Balance, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 50″ x 50″
Pintek Collection, Dunjaska Strada. Slovakia

Recognition, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 18″
Pintek Collection, Dunjaska Strada. Slovakia

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐  A Magnificent Retrospective of an Extraordinary Artist’s Life & Work

Review by Jay Bremyer, Author and Juris Doctor, November 8, 2023

Archaeology of Metaphor: The Art of Gilah Yelin Hirsch, Donna Stein editor, interviewer, and curator of the related exhibit, with essays by other scholars and 47 mostly full page [9.5 x 11 inches, high quality full color] plates of Hirsch’s paintings and 66 smaller figures, an artist biography and bibliography, awards list, record of major shows, and an index, totaling 182 pages, published by Skira.

This retrospective survey beautifully captures the arc and context of Hirsch’s extraordinary, multidisciplinary art and life. Rooted in soul searching as a young girl in the 1950s Jewish community of Montreal, at an early age Hirsch left a vibrant but difficult family to pursue her life’s purpose. Along the way she spent extended times alone in nature and traveled the world, often on foot, encountering extraordinary scientists, teachers, and healers.

Hirsch’s study of naturally occurring patterns that correspond to foundational alphabets led to her work on Cosmography, The Writing of the Universe, her films, her writings and presentations at many scientific conferences on psychoneuroimmunology and the restorative function of art and vision moving out from the interior of the body.

Using her cognitive discoveries and consciousness skills, Hirsch marries modern science and ancient mystic practices. As she states in the acknowledgements, her lifelong determination to understand led her to concentrate on “the relation between form in nature, form in alphabet, form in neurophysiology as they reflect each other and may lead toward healing.” This collection takes us step by step into the amazing and transformative world of Gilah Yelin Hirsch. I highly recommend it to you.

ARCHAEOLOGY OF METAPHOR: The Art of GILAH YELIN HIRSCH

ARTIST WALKTHROUGH, OCTOBER 1, 2022

ORANGE COUNTY CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART (OCCCA), SANTA ANA, CALIFORNIA

About the Exhibition

This retrospective celebrated Canadian American artist Gilah Yelin Hirsch, an influential professor of art and a pioneer of the Feminist art movement in California. The exhibit brings together original ideas in art, science, ecology, human consciousness and the additional timeless themes of race and equality.

Meaning has always been Hirsch’s primary subject matter. She has continually searched for substance beyond the obvious. In her inventive handling of ordinary subject matter like everyday food, and by superimposing images over each other in a dynamic conversation of call and response, she manipulates time through space in her quest for as yet undiscovered order. It is the unknown that lures her. There is no end to this search for it is the direction of the soul. While Hirsch is primarily a painter, the exhibition also included monotypes, photographs, books, two films and contextual materials. The pervasive question is: Does one think because of what one sees, or does one see because of what one thinks?