Abstract Forms as Subjective Metaphors in the Photography of Malka Inbal

No thinking, feeling artist, no matter how much of an abstract purist, can keep the influence of emotional experience out of his or her work, try as he or she may to deny it.

Indeed, one characteristic that distinguishes postmodern abstraction in all mediums from its earlier counterparts is the widespread acknowledgment that nonobjective compositions can carry all manner of submerged meanings beyond their immediately perceivable formal content.

This point is made especially well by the photographs of Malka Inbal, on view at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th street, from April 14 through May 5. (Reception Thursday April 16, from 6 to 8 PM).

"I joined the army at the end of the 1973 war when the corpses were brought from the battles to burial", recalls Inbal, an Israeli citizen born in Romania. "One of the female soldier's duties was to go with the soldier's families to the funerals and place bouquets of flowers on the graves. So much sadness and tragedy… so far from glory…"

Inbal's profound sense of empathy, however, did not turn her into a social realist bent on depicting injustices and human suffering in the manner of figurative artists such Ben Shahn and Leonard Baskin. Rather, much in the subliminal manner of an Abstract Expressionist, she transmutes an entire range of feelings about religious coercion, violence and loss, the crisis of aging, romantic relations and the problems of parenthood, through the visual vehicle of pure form and color.

In this regard, Inbal belongs to the tradition of adventures avant garde photographers ranging from Alvin Langdon Coburn, who was influenced by Vorticism in the early twentieth century, to contemporary photographic innovators such as David Stephenson and Adam Fuss, who explore aesthetic areas that were once thought to be the exclusive provinces of painting. Yet what Inbal brings to the medium that is uniquely her own is a sense of kinetic movement in photographic imagery akin to what Marcel Duchamp achieved in his famous painting with "Nude Descending a Staircase".

In fact, both the large scale (40" x 40") and the vibrant, light-filled colors in the series that Inbal calls "Fabric Delusion" project an impact more related to many abstract canvases than to most photographs, placing her work firmly within the contemporary category called "painterly photography". And the manner in which she makes luminously colorful shapes swirl suggestively against an all-encompassing  black background can be compared to how a choreographer makes the bodies evoke myriad emotions in the viewer by virtue of gestures ranging from the joyful to the elegiac.

"Organza fabrics were chosen, creating forms and by way of lighting, approaching the look of crystals", is how the artist poetically explains the technique employed. "Colors and shapes bubble from behind the esthetics covering the protest".

But just as knowing that a painter employed oils on canvas to create a particular picture does not diminish its power, Inbal so forthrightly disclosing her technical secrets in no way destroys the mystery of her imagery.

Rather, one marvels all the more at her ability to convey so much magic, and evoke such immutable beauty through such ostensibly simple means.

Byron Coleman