DAVID GIBSON WRITING

Life is a struggle for meaning. Sometimes we choose the struggle and sometimes the struggle chooses us. In the new exhibition of paintings by Adela Leibowitz, Rites of Passage, we are presented with various mise-en-scene in which a certain existential situation, heavily reliant upon dreams and myths, is provided for our elucidation. Whether they are treatises on the nature of being and existence, or dramas to titillate and mystify, they recommend a set of aesthetic and ontological prejudices, engaging with the vicissitudes of a socially constructed reality while not abandoning more nebulous states of being. Formally, the artist covers new ground, introducing experiments with dimension and scale, working smaller than she ever has before, which allows her to focus upon the actions of her characters as much as the settings and details which surround them. They may become reduced to pale ciphers but their circumstances are no less important. External reality is never what it seems in Leib