Gloria Garfinkel’s exhibition of twenty-five prints, paintings and sculptures, from her output of the 1980’s, accentuates the artist’s dramatic intellectual and emotional interconnection to the art, culture and nature of Japan.  The unprecedented fusion of Japanese culture in her works is stunningly apparent in the Hanabi (Celebration) Maquette sculptures, the Ginko Kimono painting series, and the related narrow Obi (Kimono sash)-shaped canvas paintings. The various woodcut prints, etchings, and collaged etchings from the Kiku (Chrysanthemum) group present a rewarding selection of her extensive print oeuvre.  “Flip” interactive aluminum wall paintings complete the rich roster of diverse yet harmonious works whose origins in cross-fertilization with Japanese heritage bring a refreshingly unique vision to Western sensibilities. xxxxxx

Garfinkel imbues meaning in the proliferating structures through her flair for uniting shapes with decorative colored patterns, producing metaphor in an abstract format.  Innumerable marks, shapes, and colorful combinations of dots, crosses, ribbons and lines converge in a vibrant expression that uplifts the spirit in an assertion of celebratory joy.  Her ingenuity is boundless; she has a signal intuitive feeling for the organization of negative space that she skillfully orchestrates, especially in her Hanabi Maquette sculpture series. The “Hanabi” (celebration) aluminum triangular assembled sculptures recreate the feeling of a flock of plumed birds poised for flight. The works inscribe meaning through the carved space that brings the air and surrounding expanse into the patterned sculptural domain.

Above right: ‘Hanabi #8’ front (2005), Machette, Painted Aluminum 21 x 171/4 x 9”

This technique allows Garfinkel to achieve, with sensitivity and sympathy, a sense of aesthetic balance that replicates life’s clamor of impressions, relationships and events. The carefully constructed negative space, juxtaposed with the saturated hues and striking shaped designs, relieves the eye while simultaneously providing maximum visual stimulation.  As in life, the sharp edges may point upward and out, while at other times they point down and away, relieving the challenge of potential difficulties.  Garfinkel’s accomplishment is particularly noteworthy, as she manages to replicate in durable painted aluminum the fragile appearance of dainty paper Origami creations.

The artist’s interactive works retain their aesthetic strength and integrity as each mobile piece is related, through design and color, to the work in its entirety.  Garfinkel generously includes the viewer in the excitement of touching, moving and interfacing with a wall work of art.  She employs durable motorcycle paint that forges a bond with an American cultural icon. Variation is the key to Garfinkel’s artistic oeuvre; she is nothing if not inventive.  Her exquisite oil and acrylic “Obi” (kimono sash) works display collage-like elements with two juxtaposed sections, presenting cropped, elongated parts that elicit a sense of continuation, as if the forms will eternally grow and change.

The square “Ginko Kimono” pieces convey a flowing sense of organic variety through diagonally collaged shapes, to recreate the layered and recycled look of textiles in a method used by Japanese women to originate new styles. The “Kiku” etchings represent a variation on the striped element also to be found in the “Obi” and “Ginko Kimono” works. The stripes included in Garfinkel’s works are never isolated or arbitrary, as they reflect a meaningful symbol in Japanese art and clothing design.  Her use of stripes originates in the woodblock print on paper entitled “Chrysanthemum,” by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 – 1858). Leaves, blossoms and overlaid patterns accentuate a love of nature and all its myriad revelations.

The wall work entitled “Seven Circles” compresses overlapping, undulating circles that elicit the movements of celestial bodies rotating on different orbital planes.  The densely packed repetitions of stripes, squares and triangles replicate musical melodies in visual rhythms that suggest breaking waves. “Kimono Hanabi #3” is an etching collage that adds architecture to the mix of overlapped pictorial elements, conflating the appearance of buildings and clothing (kimonos) in evocative multiple meanings. The scalloped edges featured in the “Kiku #1” etching group facilitate the interpenetration of the petal-bound central format with the striped circular exterior zone.

Left: Kiku # 1 (1997), Etching, Two Layers on Somerset texture white, handwork 18 x 18”

Garfinkel’s modular process morphs the freshness of Japanese-engendered practices to an accessible post-modern mode of hybrid painterly expression. The works pivot on her extreme creative instinct for extending divergent motifs that inscribe meaning to recycled forms, which mine the limits of the abstract genre. Garfinkel’s ability to balance striking elements in an integral visual harmony brings transformation to the borders of imagination, yielding vibrant works whose fundamental truths probe the similarities between Western and Japanese art forms.

By Mary Hrbacek, Contributing Writer

At the Springfield Museum, Springfield, Massachusetts, through April 26, 2015 http://www.springfieldmuseums.org/