galia linn mai 49—watercolors

January 14–March 4, 2023
Hamzianpour & Kia
Los Angeles

PRESS RELEASE
VIDEO: CONVERSATION BETWEEN SHANA NY DAMBROT AND GALIA LINN

Galia Linn Mai 49—Watercolors is a series of highly textured paintings executed in 2021-22. The works capture sites of devastation and the aftermath of war, revealed through intertwined layers of ink, paint, and salt. They are inspired by the artist’s discovery of several black and white photographs taken by her father-in-law, Arie (Leo) Noy, which documented bombing sites around Tel Aviv following Israel’s Independence War (1947-1949). Noy had inscribed on the back of the photographs “Mai 49.” The discovery of the photographs led Linn to explore shared memories: of pain and obliteration, but also of beauty and hope.

Working in watercolor and with salt on the plastic surface of Yupo and with the photographs as her guide, Linn began experimenting with themes of heaviness and lightness, presence and absence, and pain and relief. The use of salt heightened the sense of performative ritual surrounding the work: the salt that falls off the painting salts the earth, the salt that stays on the painting then becomes salt of the earth.

Like Noy, who with his family escaped Berlin during the Holocaust, Israel born Linn is an immigrant from a war-torn landscape. Mai 49 is in part a way to reveal traumas experienced through the body, senses, and inherited memories, but also seek to embody and then release these traumas.