CPS London trip artist.

Yehudit Sasportis

at Frieze London Oct 2013

Yehudit Sasportas from Israel displayed two pieces at the frieze festival this year. 

The images are the artists own depiction of a bog in a forest in Germany. 

Drawn with ink onto fine art paper she uses deep, dark areas and strong depth to make the images disappear into the distance. Large clear expanses of grey and white give the impression of muddy snowfall and what really stands out is the way she expresses textures on the surface through scrubbing the ink onto the paper and letting it run or drip down from the top. 

The monotone images are very dramatic and the size she paints at works well in the way you feel like you are looking out of a window or straight at the abstract landscape in front of you. 

She uses lines, scribbles and dissipating circles of ink to draw us into the scene and tries to impress on us the size and spread of the bog.

I think she makes the works as a recording of these places as they start to disappear and shows us not just the landscape as it appears in front of her but also how the place makes her feel. She does this in a way that makes the images look dirty and grimey and cold which reflects the fact they were produced during long wet winters. 

Sasportas takes a dying landscape and through her own memories and images offers us very striking abstract paintings that are both dramatic and beautiful to look at. 

In my charcoal works I'm trying to find a new way of translating a landscape onto the paper in a new unique way and these images are so close to what I'd like to do. The messy but controlled look really appeals to me and I intend to research her works more in the future.