Eelena Rotenberg Ajoku
Weeping Women
Gallery II
June 01 2023 - July 01 2023

Gallery II is proud to present Weeping, a solo exhibition by the artist Elena Rotenberg Ajoku. The exhibition presents a series of paintings that most of them were created during the last two years, using airbrush technique: thin paint pushed by air pressure onto the canvas.

Rotenberg Ajoku's paintings have a nuclear, fuzzy quality that doesn't allow for focusing. She works facing conventions of images, emphasizing the presence of dream consciousness in everyday life. Her paintings evoke a feeling of emptiness, anticipation, a ghostly image that aims to point to something without being able to touch the thing itself.

Whether shedding a tear or sobs, A Weeping Woman is not an easy sight to behold. With the crying comes the realization that this thing, which the woman tried to contain, is broken. From the beginning it was gentle, and from the beginning they expected her to contain it with forces that need to be mustered and that was destined to break. A porcelain woman is mass produced. The mold is the same and the sculptures come out the same, but the final touch is done by a human hand with a brush. The hand must quickly draw on a moving tape thousands of black dots that will be the eyes, thousands of red lines that will be the lips and thousands of pink spots that will be the blush on the cheeks. And so it happens, that every porcelain woman comes out a little different. One with lipstick sticking out of her lips, another with blush kissing her nose, one with her eyes looking up and another staring straight ahead. In the painting "Weeping Sisters" the figures look as if they were all cast into one mold. A block of porcelain that only the painting afterward made it possible to separate into three. The inaccuracies of mass production made one long hand look like it had a palm on both ends, like a double-edged sword, only instead of blades - clasped hands. As hard as it is to observe weeping, it is just as easy to join in. And really maybe, these paintings don't need a casual look, and therefore they don't devote themselves to it completely. The blurring helps us to see the painting through an imaginary layer of tears in the corner of the eye, as partners in sorrow. The spray repels the gaze that tends to seek focus and leaves the tear as the only fulcrum. The paintings presented in the exhibition were made with an airbrush: thin paint pushed by air pressure and sprayed onto the canvas. This series is endowed with a special quality - it seems that the splashed paint collected the air through which it passed on the canvas, and thus the paintings are filled with it, with air, no less than with paint. Before we call the form we are looking at by name, if we could generally forget the names of things, we will look at the painting and see that it itself floats, airy, transparent.

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Eelena Rotenberg Ajoku​

(b. 1991) ​Was born in Russia, and lives and works in Tel Aviv.

She earned her BFA from the Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art in 2014, and her MFA from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in 2018. She has been awarded the 2019 Mosnat Mozes Award for Painting and the 2022 Ministry of Culture Young Artist Award. Her paintings are part of the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Israeli Art Collection, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, contemporary collection of Israeli art, the Knesset of Israel’s contemporary art collection and private collections. Rotenberg Ajoku's paintings have a nuclear, fuzzy quality that doesn't allow for focusing. She works facing conventions of images, emphasizing the presence of dream consciousness in everyday life. Her paintings evoke a feeling of emptiness, anticipation, a ghostly image that aims to point to something without being able to touch the thing itself.

Photos Gallery