Lorraine Shemesh

[10][11][12] Describing these qualities, Art in America critic Jonathan Goodman wrote, "being true to nature enables Shemesh to record a dazzling array of painterly gestures, some of them squarely within the tradition of Abstract Expressionism ...

[3][6] Shemesh's early work included figurative drawings and pictorial quilts, Hopper-esque cityscapes and interiors, and still-life tabletop groupings of food and everyday objects, such as beach balls, flip-flop sandals, rubber gloves and women's bathing suits.

[30][31][15][2] Her still lifes consisted of graphite drawings and brightly colored oil paintings with a debt to Wayne Thiebaud that combined detailed, realist rendering with what Art in America's Carl Little called a sociocultural eye for excess and darker themes involving mortality, vulnerability and the "desperate sentimentality" of commonplace, non-elitist objects.

[25][33][1][7] At a distance, the paintings function as classical, figurative compositions of athletic figures—displaying observational powers critics compared to George Bellows's boxers—which close up dissolve into neo-impressionist investigations of pure light or lyrical abstraction.

[28][12][7][34] Critics suggested that these expressive qualities opened the paintings to diametrically opposite interpretations, as sensually pleasurable experiences or as more disquieting dramas of disorientation, isolation, silence or danger, particularly in later works of solitary, often cropped or truncated figures whose faces are not visible.

[28] Shemesh's 2000 show, "Water-Works," consisted of large oils and gestural studies that critics wrote, demonstrated intense, equal interest in the twisting, bending and contorting of the athletic body and the distortions of never-still water.

[1][4] The New York Times's Ken Johnson described the paintings as swimmers with backs arched, grasping one another's feet to form "a living yin-yang symbol" around the canvas perimeter, "immersed in luminous, painterly flux.

[19][29][6][11] Completely covered in hooded costumes of wide black and white bands, the dancers enacted elaborate, sensual poses that Shemesh set against hazy, neutral grounds and contained within shallow, near-claustrophobic spaces comprising the picture plane.

"[6] Beginning in 2016, Shemesh began to exhibit paintings and drawings with porcelain and stoneware vessels that shared preoccupations with pattern, geometry, twisting and interlocking forms, and metamorphoses of shape and light from figuration to abstraction.

[3][6] Describing the interaction between mediums, A. Bascove wrote, "the sensation of impassioned movement, often with a precarious edge, abounds ... the gravitational pull of order into chaos becomes a meditation on the passage of time and the keenly felt circumstances of life itself.