Gabriel Klasmer is an Israeli artist living in London. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally, throughout his illustrious career as painter, and is known for his experimental and performance-based processes that investigate the nature of painting itself. In this new body of work, Klasmer employs an innovative painting technique of his own invention that reveals the mysterious appearances of female faces (parzoufot), which seem to appear automatically on the canvas.

The faces are not of real women, but are conjured from the artists mind, a female world he has created that is influenced by images from the fashion and celebrity media, as well as the memory of faces of women he has known. These women's faces are not only beautiful, but present intense and intelligent gazes, that also appear distant and melancholic. Klasmer's process creates an active optical illusion that moves from negative-to-positive as the viewer engages the canvas from different angles, a visual effect that presents the possibility of painting and photography linked together.

Curator Marie Shek writes in her statement about the exhibition: The paintings of female faces that Gabriel Klasmer creates are so delicate that they appear to be created from "sand in the wind." They are precious because they seem to be disappearing from the material world to the spiritual one. Klasmer paints with a style that exists between a non-real, figurative one to an unfinished, abstract style in order to avoid kitsch or any kind of sweetness.

These faces seem, at first, familiar but in fact, they have no identity. They are from anywhere and from everywhere, symbolizing some nostalgia for a memory that doesn't exist or that the artist is longing for. The colors that he uses are white, silver, grayish. These elements are the fundamental basis of the almost ghostly women who appear as dreamlike images.

The monochrome palette creates a mysterious world in which we are wondering what the artist wanted to reveal to us in creating such amazing fictional creatures. Portraits have been made throughout Art History, (from Mona Lisa, to Velasquez, and from Holbein to Julian Opie or to the legendary Gerard Richter who combines painting and photography in a way that the artist admires very much, and that is so subtle that one can easily argue about it's origin). Gabriel Klasmer belongs to that tradition that wants to assure us that the act of figurative painting is also part of the representation of our contemporary culture, as opposed to the conceptual one.

These female painted faces are intriguing by their strong presence and characters. They are very elegant in their pictorial world, they gaze at us directly, and they embody ourselves as if we have shared some time in the past. Initially, they where taken from magazines and photos that Klasmer collected, but as time passed, the artist preferred to invent them and to use his imagination and memory in order to face the difficulties of assessing beauty. He says, "The over shadowing of the image and how representational it is of the object it emulates brings me to think that the painting of a face challenges me to create a face which is able to attract the eye." The viewer will take these women with him and will be surprised of the effect it will make on him because these "parzufot" cannot be erased form the memory as they appear, their beauty strikes you in a way that you cannot forget them. They reveal some inner female power that even the artist is amazed to have created them, they are often, a surprise, even to him.

Born in 1950, Jerusalem. Lives and works in London. He has been awarded several art prizes among them the prestigious Israeli Museum's Sandberg Prize (1990). He is in major collections of the museums in Israel, and in the Museum of Modern art in New York, along many private collections. In 1996 Klasmer represented Israel in the 23rd International Biennial of Sao Paulo.

On winning the Clore scholarship Gabriel came to London to study for MA and later completed a PhD research degree both at the Royal College of Art in London. His research focuses on the examination of the history and status of the monochrome painting, and his ongoing creation of a series of mechanical apparatuses that replace the human hand as a means of making work.

Marie Shek is an independent curator currently living in Paris. She recently curated the exhibition Insomniac Promenades, which opened at the Passage de Retz in Paris and traveled to the Petah Tikva Museum in Israel.