Galleries: In prints and paintings, an outlook on devastation

Familiar to Philadelphians from her Print Center solo of 2008 and PAFA's Philagrafika group show of 2010, Orit Hofshi's carved woodblock and painted renderings of desolate, roiling, war-torn landscapes are so visceral that viewers can almost feel the intense energy that propels Hofshi as she works.

The sensation of sharing a physical relationship with the art resonates in her current solo exhibition, "Orit Hofshi: Resilience" at Swarthmore's List Gallery, too, but the enormous scale of her work in this modestly sized gallery make the massive woodcuts, prints and paintings appear to be windows looking out to kaleidoscopic scenes of destruction in a country of no particular identity. That is a slightly scary, discombobulating feeling. When you learn that Hofshi's mother was the only Jewish child to escape the Nazi occupation of her town in then-Czechoslovakia (she and Hofshi's father, also a Holocaust survivor, helped found Matsuva, one of Israel's first kibbutzim), you realize that these indeterminate, devastated landscapes are much more literal than they look.

In fact, Hofshi's invented landscapes are largely based on sites in her native Israel, although the ruins in them can suggest landscapes in European countries as well. Occasionally a solitary male figure appears, paused in a moment of reflection or on a mission. In all these landscapes, it's clear that something happened and that the rubble holds the clues.

This is most obvious in the painting Reclaim, which depicts a man in a suit clambering through detritus with an expression of fierce determination on his face. (This also happens to be the one work in the exhibition that makes me think of America, of the images of destruction after Hurricane Katrina, and of the work of William Kentridge, with whom Hofshi has been compared.)

The exhibition marks her first installation, Convergence, which takes up the entire back space of the gallery. (I did not consider her 2010 Philagraphika work, If the Tread is an Echo, to be an installation, though some viewers may have because it could be entered.) Viewed from a wooden observation deck and theatrically lit, the space, which has been painted entirely black, has shallow, rectangular trays filled with inky fluid on its floor. It could be a shoreline as seen at night.