Larry Abramson

For over 40 years of painting, Larry Abramson has focused his gaze on situation of desintegration and collapse. Rather than lament the lost utopia of modernist totality, he has always attempted to reconstruct an aesthetic world from the bits and pieces salvaged from the pile of history's debris. In January 2020, when Har-El Printers & Publishers in Jaffa invited Abramson to make a group of original new prints, the workshop facilities were under two feet of rainwater as the result of a downpour that had flooded the entire neighbourhood. While the printers removed the water, Abramson scouted the environs of the workshop, scavenging for dislocated objects that had been deposited there by the flood - a rubber boot, a computer line, a glove, a branch - the silhouettes of which he incorporated into the prints he made. These became layered "Indexes", one-to-one impressions of the disarray of the moment, visual records struck, adding yet another layer of disorientation and disruption to the process. In this project, we worked with total disregard for the serial principles of printmaking, applying mixed-media to large-scale chipboards and improvising new and different compositions every time round. The resulting suite of one-off works is a dynamic representation of contemporary life, ever threatened by immanent deconstruction but always striving for a moment, albeit transient, of balance and harmony.