Ruth Bloch Gallery
Ruth Bloch was born in Israel in 1951 to artist parents. Her father was a musician, while her mother worked in ceramics, Ruth's family were members of a kibbutz called Alonim, a place where childhood and early youth afforded her many opportunities to develop her artistic talents. Reaching adulthood, Ruth attended the Avny Art Institute in Tel Aviv, and took additional studies in psychology in the United States.
Currently Ruth Bloch lives and sculpts in Israel. Her work exhibits a great depth of feeling for the human figure, revealing the living unity of her masculine and feminine forces. Her works are exhibited all over the world.
RUTH BLOCH by Andrew McDonnell
Today art is often more about an aggressive attitude or
posture rather than the experience of beauty; or it is an elaborate-and academic-show-and-tell game.
The artist "shows," but not before her critics or interpreters reveal all bombastic allegation, thick with political, over-intellectual, and hyperbolic baggage. The work or its meaning, the artist's supposed philosophy or inescapable political and social views or origins, trap her or him, and the art, and then snare us.
Art becomes the servant of bad thought rather than good, the slave of the slogan, and servile missile or fume, and pretentious futile speech making. The speech comes first, the art comes last.
With Ruth Bloch that is not what art is about. Art is not a con game of fashionable political platitude, or textual criticism designed to beguile the academic and boggle the viewer. Bloch's work is happily detached from the intellectual demonstration that has become the progressive arthritis of art, hobbling its practice, and its love.
Bloch's hands are free and flexible to make what she wants, and feels; and so, free of the need to define by negatives-as to what she is not, or does not want, or does not do--she is pleased enough to show and tell what it is she does, as a sculptor and as an artist, and creator.
She is accordingly positive: not just affirmative, but emphatic and optimistic in her belief in nature and in life, and in the human kind and nature she freely styles in unaffected and untrammeled creation. Hers is a view to see, and to style, an uncomplicated good in form, preserved from the fury and commotion of posture, reserving in pose, and poise, humane motion.
The common catch-phrase "lyrical," when used in art writing, is mostly a mere empty emotive term, meaning "good" or "I like"-a point that might please positivist and Wiener Kreis-type logicians, if not the scribbler or auctioneer. In Bloch's sculpture, "lyrical" takes a more precise sense. Here, it connotes how in her work, a gesture or fugitive moment is caught, captured, once briefly elapsed.
This is an art of deep, immanent feeling, like a haiku of the body, and the form beings of limb and soul speak free. But with Bloch, feeling is not sentimental. She wants an art that is not "nice" but good -qualified not only by strength but real artistic merit She wants art to be good with the same good we find when we experience life: not just with a sense of joy and an openness to beauty, but with the moral integrity and the firm resolve to perpetuate nothing else but good in our lives, our feelings, our actions and our works, and the deeds like things we propagate and raise to life in the world of souls of fellow birth.
Bloch wants that strong reaction from the viewer: a visceral art, that shows what it tells, with forms that, as she puts it, "bounce into the intellect," like benign free
radicals.
And such is the art she would have us see, when looking to her work, and indeed applying as students to it. We can be guided, to intuition or its understanding, if we see certain affinities in her work to other artists, so long as we do not overdo it, and harden these into stereotypes, pat schools, or a sort or phrenology of the heart, as bumpy and faulty as the kind once designed on the head. So with her flights and forms, the viewer can make out resemblances-as to the early Arp, or Matisse, as in the period of Le Luxe, the love of flow in drawing out gentle lines.
In sculpture specifically, Bloch's sweeps and seized embraces come like less abstract reprise of the likes of Brancusi, with a humane sway and animation in concrete flight, as Shelley's skylark, with limb and gesture drawn out by the plumeless streak of meditation, arching and tensile for its cast: perhaps again Arp; or Henry Moore, if not so earthbound, but instead, protracted and elongated in the bend and pounce of unspent, unending suspense ofline and mobile life.