GAL SCHINDLER
Name: Gal Schindler
Age: 29
Birthplace: Israel
Home: London, UK
Discipline: Painting
Oblivion, 2022
What’s usually the starting point of your practice, and when does your work feel complete?
I often start with an image which I want to try to translate into a painting. That initial process, however, isn’t exactly a translation but more of an instigation, a way to dive into a mental space, a rhythm of dealing and playing around with paint. I think I ask myself a lot this question of when is the painting ‘done’ because I don’t want to know when it is done. I don’t always have a very clear prepared notion of the final outcome. Each one of the paintings I make confuses me in some way. I look for a sense of balance with itself, and growth in relation to the paintings that I have made previously.
What are you obsessed with?
Women.
What are the interactions that you seek between your work and the viewer?
Above all, I think I want the viewer to feel with their eyes. To stop thinking in words and move into the senses. To experience a range of contradictions and restrictions which exists in everyone’s reality and perhaps while doing so, turning them into something meaningful, into sensitivity, freedom, hope... some kind of power.
Painting was always more of an urge for a dialogue primarily with myself and my private reality, through images and movement, so I don’t exactly always ‘seek’ or think of the viewers in a calculated way. That will make me very carefully consider everything I do, and that is a very hard place to be in if you want to be creative. What I want from my work, therefore perhaps from the viewers also, is often to challenge and lead to the next work, the next moment, to provoke and to please, to pull towards the important questions.
What is your commitment, both artistically and personally?
I am committed to truth, to justice. To always doubt.
Who are some of the artists that have been the biggest influence on you?
Munch, Toulouse-Lautrec, Kirchner, Cranach, Guston, Balthus, Louise Bourgeois, Georgia O’Keee, Hilma af Klint, Maria Lassnig, de Kooning, Monet, Redon.
Where is the beauty for you today?
In the eyes of the old man from the market this morning, who was standing by his flower stand packed with fresh giant white hydrangeas.