Adela Leibowitz shows us her world of fable like paintings of little girls lost in eerie blue landscapes. Time travel to the days when monsters walked the earth with us, legends aboundedof cursed exchanges between animals and people, and deer trapped on a floating iceberg in the wide open sea are just a few of the sinister warning tales. The little girls are embodiments of everyday people, participating as both the watchers and instigators in the unfolding scenes. Questions of existential angst, power and mortality are explored in Leibowitz’s finely rendered paintings where outcomes and final verdicts are always left to be seen in a dual light.

Adela Leibowitz draws on the influence of choose your own ending children’s story books, current political power struggles, mass annihilation and the threat of environmental changes in her almost stage set like recreations of reality in a seemingly unreal world.

The title “The Cassandra Prophesies” alludes to the tragic Greek figure of Cassandra, and what she would have foreseen were she here today...

Some history on Cassandra:

Her name, Cassandra, has two distinct meanings. Robert Graves translates it from Greek to mean "she who entangles men", which is ironic since, although she was stunningly beautiful, her 'madness' repelled most men and her prophesies foretold their ignorant deaths. Today, we call a "Cassandra" someone whose true words are ignored, since Cassandra's doom was to predict what others refused to believe. (Graves p747, Powell p325)

hpgrp gallery introduced Adela Leibowitz last year in our exhibition Day Dreaming. Adela was in the Woman: Self-Portrait group show at Kashya Hildebrand Gallery and has had a solo show at both the OK Harris Gallery and Jack the Pelican Presents Gallery in addition to a two-person show at Dabora Gallery. She was the 2002/3 recipient of the P.S. 122 residency and a grant recipient from the George Sugarman Foundation Grant.

Adela Leibowitz