The Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s American Friends, Storage, and Ariel Fishman were pleased to host a special a tour of Olivia Springberg’s show at Storage Gallery, followed by a studio visit with Jacqueline Gourevitch at her Tribeca studio.
Together, these two artists offered a compelling cross-generational dialogue. Gourevitch’s meditative abstraction met Springberg’s emerging spiritual symbolism, both anchored in Jewish identity yet expressing distinct worlds of vision.
Jacqueline Gourevitch (b. Paris, 1933) is a New York–based painter known for her long-running Cloud Paintings series, begun in the 1960s - abstract, atmospheric works that investigate light, space, and form. Her parents, German Jewish refugees, fled to the U.S. in 1940, settling in New York. Now 91, she is one of the last living members of the New York School and among the few surviving graduates of Black Mountain College. Gourevitch studied at Black Mountain College in 1950, where she encountered a generation of modernist luminaries, including Josef Albers and Willem de Kooning, was mentored by Robert Motherwell, attended lectures by Clement Greenberg, and shared classrooms with Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. In 1973, she was included in the Whitney Biennial, and in 1975, her work was presented in the Wadsworth Atheneum’s Matrix series. More recently, in 2015, Helen Molesworth featured her in Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 at the ICA Boston, affirming her place in the lineage of influential postwar artists. She taught at Wesleyan University (where she taught artists such as Glenn Ligon) and Cooper Union.
Olivia Springberg (b. 2000) is a Brooklyn-based painter whose work draws from Jewish tradition, dream theory, archaeology, and the occult to create spiritually charged compositions. Known for her use of non-traditional canvas shapes, Springberg transforms the very structure of her paintings into symbolic forms—Fodors Menorah, for example, takes the shape of the eponymous religious icon. Her work references geoglyphs, ancient script, and relief sculpture, resulting in silhouettes that feel both protohistorical and rooted in 20th-century modernism. In Song of Songs (After Tobiasse), Springberg directly references and reinterprets the French painter’s depiction of a scene from the Hebrew Bible, layering her composition with abstraction and symbolic resonance. Her flattened planes and watchful figures recall artists like Paul Klee and Remedios Varo. Springberg describes her process as revealing “imagined barriers” through an X-ray-like layering of paint—deconstructing, obscuring, and re-excavating images to make visible what lies beneath.