As witnesses to a mission of mercy, Ruth Schloss’ works cry out against the “anti-indifference” of the ego toward the other, toward the human. The artist who, in her paintings and drawings, commemorated the impressions of her uncompromising testimony, characterized her art—and art generally—as a personal response, conscious or unconscious, to the artist’s contact with the time, the environment, and the society in which she lives and works. The Anyway exhibition presents, and gives presence to, three segments of Schloss’ work:

Nabiha: a shared language
Turning her attention to the individual in her works, Schloss substantiated the life-story of Nabiha, a hardscrabble Christian Arab woman who remained alone after her family migrated to neighboring Arab countries in the aftermath of the 1948 war. Although Schloss’ visual documentation of Nabiha is personal, it is not dissociated from her way of viewing the collective narrative. Her piercing, level gaze always turns toward the pitfalls of daily life and human existence.

Face to face
In many of her paintings, Schloss preserved the creases and traces of her characters’ faces.
Gazing straight ahead or with eyes diverted, they appear sunken into themselves or converging with their foreground. The facial traces in the portraits on display at the exhibition upset the serenity of those who observe them, demanding their awareness, responsibility, or non-indifference.

Transparent observation points
Schloss’ Israel war paintings from 1949 onward are based on documentary photography of the calamities of war that resolved into seized lands, demolished structures, people living in destroyed houses, terror in women’s and children’s eyes, refugee convoys, an abandoned battlefield, and remnants of corpses. In her works, Schloss commemorated all of these as remnants of the destruction and devastation that spread among both the victors and the vanquished. Influenced by her contemplation of the photographs, Schloss painted her view of war through the windows of the battle, thus drawing the observer’s gaze to the remnants of the destruction and faraway victims.

Schloss took responsibility, trustfully and unreservedly, for the deep and stinging appearance of her works, which turn the viewer’s gaze toward the so-present other—who is totally foreign to the viewer—in their bleakest hours. Her works explicate the connection to the individual’s outcry and leave searing signs of the intersubjective relationship between the non-other and the other, seemingly separate but interdependent.

Curator: Nava T. Barazani