Irith Bloch Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1938 -

Born in Mulhouse (France) 1938

Studied at Fine Art Academy in Antwerp (Belgium)

Lives in Tel Aviv, Israel since 1962

Works of small dimensions,
an accumulation of cosmic fragments
light and earth, flora and fauna
all combining into a powerful vibrating silence and clarity
impelling the eye to peer beyond them.
Constant tension-between the personal experience and the universal,
a fragile balance between the temporal and the eternal,
becoming and dissipating, growing and perishing.
These works of infinite depth and endless spaciousness
deal with states and their innumerable elements
integrating and disintegrating simultaneously.
Like deciphering a secret code -
continuous struggle between the discloses and what remains elusive,
and above all - a tenacity to penetrate and touch rock bottom.
This is not abstract -
but a lengthy process of crystallization towards the essential,
revealing a forceful vision of clarity and simplicity.

Raoul Linton

Irith Bloch - Works on Paper

(...) Under the sometimes delicate aspect of layers of paper, wool thread or cotton, glued on each other, hides a tenacious, meticulous work, in constant search. This work evokes the secret memory, unconscious, a link between the past and the eye of today. (...)
Entity of surprising material sometimes like this wool, red and blue that would come straight out of a chemical experiment. Or, these cotton flowers, rearranged, whose colored thread highlights, in the middle of this trail of white powder, the evidence of imperfection, the alteration, the jostling of life and emotions.
(...) Knowing how to detect in this fugitive evocation a melee with matter, a constant updating of emotions, a deep work on the exact form of a memory, a sensitive adjustment of colors, fruit of thought and truth interior of the artist. (...)
Perhaps be astonished by the perseverance of work, by this inner thread that continues to expand, by years of building, piece after piece, a work that seems fragile and fleeting. Built over the years, in keeping with the passing of time, witness of the artist's constant relationship with life, matter and elements. The eye thus sees revealed beyond the limpid simplicity of a surface an entanglement of paths and emotions, the sign of an undeniable grip on life. (...)

David Kanner

A whole, almost nothing
Works on wire and writing - Irith Bloch

By David Kanner

It's sometimes innocuous. A trace of threads on a blank page. The sheet pierced by the gold thread, the scribbled words, the constricted writing, wandering, tiny signs, tiny, then a breakaway, somewhere outside the frame, like to breathe, to find another way, a unprecedented direction. A moose?
Or, an embroidery. The thought that stops on a story, tries to decipher a meaning, an image: there, the intertwined threads, the corset, the opening at the bottom, the immaculate white, the lace, a dress, a coat, a covering ?
But it may be more of a work with matter, of an essay constantly renewed, rehashed, of an attempt to approach something, someone, an object, a person, a state.

To intervene at the bottom of things through little things. Papers that fly away, stand out in the corners, are lost, snapped, incidences with the material, exposed to the gold, red, silver, copper threads. An insistence to treat the white, the black, to follow the repetitions, to take, to leave aside, to catch up.

Things are piled up, like souvenirs, a detour in the past, there remains a ball, covered with another thickness, transparent, almost invisible, compact.
Do not say, do not read, of course, what is written. There is nothing. Like the words that are forgotten, the things we said. Only the moments are left sorted as in an inner cabinet, mixed with each other, penetrating in itself, indelible. To remember things in depth. Describe these moments. We will not say anything. It's forgotten.

It's certain. So much so, that those who have remained at the bottom of the ocean, resurface like a sea of ??ink, black jet, the white already evaporates, caught up with thoughts, words and gestures. It looks like a planet. Everything is there, the strata and rocks, the thicknesses at the source, the blood flowing in the veins.

Oh sure, it's crumpled.
It's pulled towards the center.
Adjusted.

One could almost touch, to see, how it feels on the finger, as when caressing an old tapestry, and then feel on its skin the drawing, a protection, the circles of the pencil drawn in the flesh.

In a corner, surely, again, there is room for this red square, this ball of fire, this green task, this blue balloon, this black tar, this exhaustion of the senses and words, an extension, a story for finally tell the essential, what is not said.