Project no. 223 Project No. 223
Christina Weiss Heart tissue intricacies
Cristina Weiss | Stitching the Heart
Curator: Rachel Sukman Curator: Rachel Sukman
Festive opening: Friday, 12.3.2021 at 11:00

The exhibition will feature Christina Weiss' works as a kind of testimony from the Corona period in Israel and as a marker of survival difficulties. The soft collages are surrounded by rusty iron frames as a metaphor for the difficult crises of time, which left us marks and have not yet passed. Most of all, the exhibition reflects the intricacies of Weiss's heart tissue.

"At every seam I sew my wishes and prayers. Nowadays it is customary to keep everything in the cloud, and I ask myself, will the cloud remember? The tissue is my private cloud, a kind of will for the near-distant environment."

Weiss creates collages from fine fabrics, soft to the touch, which require endless delicacy. The thread and needle, which are inserted into them in the act of embroidery, injure them, but at the same time, in the very same action, also connect them into a structure of folded fabrics, which liquefy down by gravity. The collage is woven in symbiosis between the colors of the fabrics and the embroidered images. The natural movement of the fabrics is preserved and reminds of the world of dance, which is imprinted in Weiss' roots as a ballet dancer, a world from which she draws inspiration even today.
The transitions and connections between the fabrics produce a complex system, based on an inherent dependence between the various materials, which strive for independence but merge into a complete collage. The intelligent use of textiles preserves freshness, evident in the works despite their laborious quality, and reflects the dance of the needle on the painting substrate. As a painter and dancer she brings together two worlds of content, and through careful coloration produces a delicate play between the world of dance and the world of painting. Some tissue appears as a surface of color, and some is present as a color-saturated drawing.
Weiss chooses themes such as Byzantine icons, but instead of depicting saints, she uses natural landscapes, which are incorporated into a religious composition. The tissue of the leaves, marked only by an outline, expresses the feeling that it is impossible to fill - a blank that indicates the essence of life. "I was looking for the unknown," she says, adding, "As a person I feel alone. The dream is to find myself and draw music."
During the Corona period, Weiss began creating fabric collages, which she put together into a tissue substrate. The brush was replaced with a needle and threads. The works are created intuitively. The fabrics are derived from unused clothes, and she rarely allows herself to purchase another piece of fabric, which is important for composition. The embroidered seams leave their mark and imprint on the fabrics and express reflections, feelings and memories. Weiss levels a personal and unique path for her to remember and be remembered, sews the fabric of her life.

Christina Weiss (b. 1944, Bucharest; lives and works in Tel Aviv) was born in Romania to a Jewish mother and a Greek Christian father. As a child she studied ballet, and in her youth she performed as a dancer in a musical-opera theater in the port city of Galatz on the banks of the Danube.
In 1965 she immigrated to Israel with her husband, the theater painter, Harry Weiss. In the same year she was accepted to the Israeli Opera under the direction of Addis de Philippe, and since then she has danced in the opera and musicals of the Giora Godik Theater. In 1967 she was accepted into the Bat-Dor ballet troupe.
In 1974, she studied painting and sculpture at the Avni Institute in Tel Aviv with the artists Moshe Sternshus and Yehezkel Streichman. Her work was deeply influenced by Streichman, as well as by the British painter Howard Hodgkin and the Romanian Tuclescu ( ? Uculescu ). From then on she devoted her life to oil painting on canvas, to bronze sculpture and wood carving. At the same time, she worked over the years as a ballet teacher at the Bikuri HaTimim Performing Arts Center and the Tel Aviv School of the Arts.
Closing: 5.4.2021
Opening hours: Monday to Thursday 10: 00-17: 00
Friday 10:00 - 13:00

Tel. 03-5254191 / 054-4527052

www.officeintelavivgallery.com
Supported by: the Ministry of Culture and Sports and the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality
With the support of the Ministry of Culture and Sports & Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality

The artist on Facebook:
Cristina Weiss

זמנהוף 6, תל אביב שלישי עד חמישי: 10:00-16:00 שישי: 10:00-13:00