Dr Nurit Cederboim

“Relationships” – is the word that best describes the central motive found in the collection of sculptures by Orna Meirov. Relationships between bodies and images, between body and object, between language and style, between the creator’s hand and the material that it touches and shapes. 

Meirov draws her subjects from the world around her, us – the human body. Man’s body is her source of inspiration. She appears to be familiar with the human body, she knows the rules of anatomy and proportion but it is as if she intentionally avoids their application. The extent to which she abandons these rules is so obvious that it indicates that this is not simply a random appearance but a conscious decision. Meirov knows the source and uses it as a point of departure and source of inspiration for her works of art.

In Meirov’s sculptures, the human body is simply the excuse for telling a story about people and the relationships between them. The embracing, linked images of her sculptures tell a story about people’s physical engagements between people that perhaps also imply emotional bonds. These are conjunctions that she creates from the point of her own bonding with the human image, and it is at this point, where she performs the creation that the material is bonded with visual language, the language of form and shape

Meirov twists the material in line with the curves of the body and often smoothes it to translate the amorphous physical forms into geometric forms. In this way she creates a dialog between different genres of art and presents some sort of visions in an interplay between organic and cubist sculpture, between circular and sharp movements, between straight lines and acute angles and soft rounded motions. Under her hands, the language of the material tells the story of relationships between bodies/images that can be translated into a system of emotions ranging from gentleness to harshness, from connection to separation, from coalescence to detachment, from reality to fantasy and from material to spirit.

It is possible to see hints of analytical cubism in the works of Meirov, characterized by the disintegration of images and limbs into fragments and then their reconstitution. When this appears in paintings, it causes loss of volume and an illusion of three-dimensionality of the image, in sculpture, the third dimension appears naturally, of itself, because of the very fact that it is a sculpture, but the resemblance to reality is impaired. Analytical cubism in sculpture investigates realistic appearances and presents an interpretation that includes style and structural form. Perhaps we can say that these works also have a touch of simultaneous cubism, in the manner in which the images move between figurative form and connection to reality and style and fantasy, the allocation of lines and different, varying facets to an image positioned in space. Simultaneous cubism in a painting tries to describe the object simultaneously from several different angles. In the sculptures, we see transitions in the same artwork between proximity to the human body – to reality, and alteration of style and design in the cubist spirit. Thus, we can say that there is a touch of synthetic cubism here that is characterized by a combination of realistic details and analytical compositions and the shaping of the form.

Meirov chooses material in order to tell a story; a story about shape, about material, about man and about herself as a creative artist. In her collection of sculptures, it seems that when she searches for her own unique method of expression, she does indeed find it and provides it with a presence.