University at Buffalo (UB)
Instead of using the somber-toned hues traditionally associated with a semiconscious ‘50s-style sublime, Dona reflects the all-too-familiar colors of institutional lunchrooms, lines of cosmetics or photochemical processes that we see reflected around us everyday. Her overtly mediated drips (their course changed by an electric fan) subvert abstract expressionism’s vocabulary of “authenticity”: the drips and splatters that bore witness to the individuality of the artist…Dona begins by dividing the canvas in two, using signifiers from opposite ends of painting, abstraction and representation. On the abstract side she contrasts expressive drips with controlled areas of masked monochromatic color…On the representational side, in addition to contrasting the opposing vernaculars of the diagrammatic and the naturalistic, Dona couples “opposing” technological imagery: automobile engine manuals next to biological diagrams of molecules.
Excerpted from catalog essay by Al Harris F.
Dona was born in Romania in 1955. She studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem and the School of Visual Arts and Hunter College, where she received her MFA. She has shown extensively in the United States and Europe.
Curated by Al Harris F.