Park Avenue Armory Treats

Cade Tompkins is a Providence-based dealer whose artists embrace luscious color, shapes that could

have come from dreams, and messages that are as various as they are unpredictable. This time, she's

focusing on Orit Hofshi (b. 1959), an Israeli artist whose monumental colored woodcuts seem to

reach for the Old Testament for gravity and mood. Woodcuts do indeed start with wood, as does

printmaking itself, since carving a design into a block of wood and then submitting it to paper, ink,

and a press is the start of the medium. Dürer's Apocalypse woodcuts from the late 1490s were the

medium's first triumph. Woodcuts also remind me of old stained glass in which the lead borders

become part of the design. Hofshi's Ephemeral Passage, from 2025, is 80 by 120 inches, a woodcut

with rubbed colored pencil; it seems like an altarpiece. There's a lot of finesse, but the themes are

powerful, somber, and timeless. The handmade paper feels like bark. I don't read any particular Old Testament story into Hofshi's work but, rather, take titles seriously. Hers suggests land that lasts as we come and go, we mortals, animals, anything that lives, grows, and dies.

 

Whatever story the individual viewer might contrive, it's going to feel hewn by hand, not massproduced, and not frilly and flaky. Ephemeral Passage is unique, not part of a limited edition as are most prints. It's $75,000. I adore Tompkins for her good taste, her artists who don't fear color, and her fierce but very classy advocacy on their behalf.