We are proud to present Ruthi Helbitz Cohen's debut US solo exhibition, with AMR Gallery, New York. 'Heavy Paper, Pain-Laced Love' features drawings, paintings, collages, and video by the Israeli artist.

The work in this exhibition is bound by the act of drawing as an element that undergirds Helbitz Cohen’s practice. Here, drawing is active - the artist draws to render, to mark, to map, to capture (a moment), and to draw out. It is additive and transparent, taking shape as loosely fragmented female forms on paper, fabric, and on the pages of the old testament, outlining a mythology equal parts personal and cultural, and rife with stains. Her work centers the images and roles of women as unruly, leaky ideas, bursting outward from their symbolic containments. Imbued with generational, personal, and ongoing trauma, the marks of repair are visible as additional marks of creation. In some works, pieces of paper stitch together to extend their ground, and others employ barrier tape bearing her family name.

Her visual language reimagines darkness and light, following its own intuitive logic that filters through images, materials, myths, and interiorities. Within this logic, black is the opposite of gold, and infinity is the opposite of broken promises. For what is an opposite, the artist asks,
than different edges of the same thing? At its core, Helbitz Cohen’s work is about a human condition - that of being female, and thus being fragmented and dispersed.

– Rachel Vera Steinberg

Photo by Allison Michael Orenstein