* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Gabriela Jolowicz captures fleeting sceneries of everyday life in one of the oldest and most traditional visual media, the woodcut. Next to almost still life images with laptop or Ipod you will find dense genre-like sceneries of metropolitan life often set in interiors such as music clubs or pool bars. The environment the artist lives in and the situations she experiences are captured in the two-dimensional woodcut within the confinements of the black and white technique. Jolowicz freezes an already fading afterimage of reality in a disjointed and kaleidoscopic manner. Nevertheless the mode of depiction appears to be realistic on first impression. On second glimpse the sobriety of the sceneries is broken up through the scattered picture references and unique compositions. Great richness of detail and a pronounced variety of structures bring about a confusing and irritating simultaneity of forms. The structures, executed in either acutely delicate or crude cuts, are heightened in a playful employment of proportions and through perspective distortion, readable as decorative graphic patterns or elements suggestive of three-dimensional depth. In this context, Herbert Eichhorn (Städtisches Kunstmuseum Spendhaus Reutlingen) alludes to “a veritable horror vacui and a desire to break open the wooden surface” and refers to the artist’s deliberate quotation of printmaking history.
