Added Oct 18, 2011
Anyone trying to classify Ruth Peled-Ney's creations, or to assign them to a particular artistic school, will be taking on a not easy task. But, despite all the difficulty, she is far from a "Noble Savage".The Noble Savagery is energy, intuition and talent that do not know, or do not want to know, that they are acting from within a complex whole. The main message is the breakthrough itself the power. Peled is well aware of her surroundings. She is a frequenter of museums and galleries both here and in art centers abroad. She reads magazines and newspapers, she has seen all the originals from Giotto to Jones, from the pyramids to Picasso, from prehistory to conceptualism. She is loaded with that elusive quality called culture.
All these neutralize the option that she works from rootless intuition, or from lack of concern for the complex and nourishes only her gut instincts. Her creations contain a degree of heresy. Intelligent heresy. No! Perhaps it would be better to say emotional heresy, because, she is telling herself that art is a privilege not an obligation, she does not feel that she has to follow well trodden path rather then to take the machete and slice her way through the bush.
Peled-Ney is a multifaceted creator. Alongside her innovative very creative psycho-therapeutic work which is practiced in various medical centers, through group dynamics and as a part of treatment of a variety of chronic illness, using methods which she has written up in her book "Pressure" and in research papers. She has written the novels "In Her Own Shadow", "No Address", "Narrow Margin", "Last Move", "Erased".
For some years now she has painted and sculpted. But she has exhibited only once.
In all these activities there is a common denominator: a loyal adherence to her personal message. Even, as we said, at the price of heresy. The confrontation point of the novel, painting or sculpture is not any absolute and external high jump bar, but rather an Archimedean value level to be found within herself. She examines herself by the yardstick of internal truth: loyalty to the full exploitation of what she wants to say.
This brochure contains few sculptures and even fewer paintings. It is not an artistic chronicle, nor is it a retrospective or an autobiography. It is a contemporary display window. The reader will not see through it the winding and somewhat random road that Peled has followed with her art: in paintings from portraits whose strength is mainly in the transmission of an emotional state, without any technical or metaphoric pretensions, through to ingenious abstracts which also portray an emotional state along with objective artistic values. We see only the last phases. The sculpture throughout most of the booklet is the bottom line of clarification. Extensive statues, reduced to their basics but not neutralized into stripped down plastic messages. They have a clearly personal dimension. After you fail to find, let's say, the link to Giacometti that is the temptation of the first glance, there is Ruth Peled. Ruth says and you are required not just to see but also to listen: to give heart and ears, not only eyes.
Ruth Peled-Ney is not a young artist. She is enlightened and experienced enough to know that she has not invented the wheel, nor has she pioneered new avenues for the art of the end of the millennium. But this is art with vitality, with the courage to be personal and even self-revealing to the eyes of anyone enlightened enough to peel back the bronze and peer inside.