OLIVE DIAMOND: TO BE SUNG AND REMEMBERED

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Olive Diamond: To Be Sung and Remembered. This is Diamond’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and presents a suite of new ceramic tableaus and vessels.

Informed by real oral histories from her family and imagined versions that expand on these narratives, Diamond’s work considers a wide-lens view of migration and movement through landscape, tableau, and portraiture. Although specifically inspired by her Jewish heritage, such as family members who escaped persecution through Russian forests, or journeyed to French colonies in Morocco, or her grandmother born in a refugee camp in Siberia, the exhibition delves into these tales of displacement and passage to explore profound depths of human experience—love and loss, fate and coincidence.

Placing these subjects in abstract and almost hallucinatory landscapes, Diamond’s reimaginings of various family passages, explores ever resonant questions about who is remembered, what traditions are passed on, and where is home? These etched stones function as tablets of memory. Situated in near-abstract landscapes and filled with light and vivid color, the artist carves a record and preserves history. She looks to the past to gain perspective and wisdom for how to move forward along in her journey through the present. Working intuitively with color, mixing her own glazes, the works retain an aura of chance and mystery; highly seductive they are born through an unfolding process of discovery and reaction.

Two bust-like vessels in the exhibition, each with an expressive face function like “omniscient protectors” in these scenes—all knowing and all seeing. They hearken to Diamond’s inspiration from Kabbalah’s that the world was created in a vessel, and that God’s light came into the vessel shattering it, infusing everything in the universe with His light. Diamond crowns these personified jars with found metal toppers, suggestive of antique perfume vessels, or uncovered antiquities, bestowing them with a deity-like presence in the exhibition, sources of spiritual strength and mystical intervention.