Opening | Thursday, April 27th, 2023 | 4:00-7:00 PM
Closing | Monday, August 7th, 2023
The Epsten Gallery is pleased to bring Chana Cromer’s exhibit, ‘Still Looking Up’ into its midst. Cromer , a multi-disciplinary artist living in Jerusalem, Israel, is a member and current chairperson of the Marie Gallery Cooperative. Her art has been shown in Israel, the USA, Russia and Germany. Her subjects have varied from responses to Biblical themes, to reacting to social issues and at present to impressions from nature, always reflected through highly personal interpretation. Cromer’s expression is most often through various techniques on fabric and collaged mixed media paintings. This exhibit includes artworks using these techniques but marks a return to acrylic on canvas.
Green is the prime color of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises.
— Pedro Calderon de la Barca, ‘La Selva Confusa’ 1623
At the center of ‘Looking Up’ is a series of tree portraits. These paintings are different responses offered by Chana Cromer, a multi-disciplinary artist, to the search she embarked on in November, 2021. After months of self-confinement under the shadow of the pandemic, she ventures from her home out to the urban landscape and gazes upwards to the treetops.
This change of perspective allows a reevaluation and focus on that which commonly evades our attention. The colors of leaves and branches, their relationship to the sky and the clouds flittering between them, the play of light and shadow and the tree’s character in relationship to the city around it; all these spark Cromer’s creativity and focus her portraiture.
The exhibition gathers the portraits of solitary trees and creates a pseudo-forest inside the gallery. The viewer is invited to wander in the forest and join in the search for a new perspective – a sensitive examination of the nature that surrounds us.
— Yuval Orion, Curator | Marie Gallery, Jerusalem, Israel | April 2022
Infinity
This miraculously still green stem has leaves to unfold,
holds in its core buds,
life that will bloom.
This old loving heart
can give, can embrace.
There is yet time to expand
in joy, in celebration, in creation.
— Chana Cromer, 2022
Chana Cromer grew up in Kansas City, the daughter of Olga and Michael Rothstein and attended Southwest High School. She received a BA in literature from Washington University in St. Louis, her MAT at Boston College in Boston.
In 1972 Cromer made Aliyah to Israel. She completed her BFA at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem in 1982. She studied etching with Clare Romano at Pratt Institute in 1979. She studied textile techniques at Philadelphia College of the Arts in 1987. She has taught art at various colleges and high schools in Jerusalem over the years.
Contact | chana-cromer.com | chanacromer@hotmail.com