October 1999
Debra Kaszovitz
What is the shape of a color? That is a question that Debra Kaszovitz often seeks to answer in her vivid painted sculptures. By combining painted and pigmented cast paper with welded metals, she hopes to create art that has a profound, lasting impact on its audience.
Using vibrant colors to "exhault the senses," her sculptures take organic, oceanic forms to represent her family's history. "My father related his experiences of surviving Auschwitz," she says. This taught her to value adaptability and bring the concepts of healing, surviving, and renewal into her work. The painted twisted metals represent people to her. She explains "they are warped, missing pieces, out of their useful context." These pieces leave traces behind in the materials of her casts, much in the way a person does when taken from his or her natural surroundings.
Debra uses color as a means of communication. She says, "It reveals emotional states. In the natural world it is a warning of a poisonous nature or means of subterfuge." Breaking away from the two-dimensional world of conventional painting, Debra Kaszovitz is creating 3-D forms that bind color, metal, and patterns to tap deep into our senses and, ultimately, our emotions.
- Selected exhibits:
- "Seachange" Solo Show, Emory University Center Gallery, June, 1998
- "The Shape of Color" Solo Show, Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, August, 1997
- Natural Visions of Art 1996, Autrey Mill Nature Preserve, October, 1996
- Seventh Annual Select State University System Show, Atlantic Center For The Arts, June, 1996
- Boca Museum's 45th Annual All Florida Juried Exhibition, Boca Raton Museum, 1996
- Selected collections:
- Percent For Art Florida
- The Nautilus Foundation
