This is one of a series of 15 pieces cast from a plaster of Paris mold of my face in 1985. The series demonstrates the hidden qualities of Hosho, a paper used in Japan for wood block printing, which I discovered is capable of picking up fine detail from the mold when wet, and retaining the form when dry. The rectangular format reminds the viewer of the original sheet of paper and the “paper-ness” of the sculpture. (Sandy)

Sandy Bleifer: Venice artist, mom, grandmom, wife, and social activist raising and expanding our consciousness

Renowned art critic Peter Frank had this to say about Sandy last February 2017, in a review called: SANDY BLEIFER: TEXTURALITY

…what has maintained steadily throughout Bleifer’s entire career has been her appreciation for and exploitation of material – principally, but not solely, paper. There is a strong imagistic bent to her visual sensibility, but it is outweighed, even as it is supported, by her sensitivity to texture and heft. In a sense, through paper, Bleifer is always balancing between the condition of painting and the condition of sculpture, fusing the facture of each into a hybrid that depends on its material to function both as support and as substance.

 

Sandy Bleifer’s signal contribution to contemporary artistic practice is her overall employment of paper towards a variety of subjects and effects. But over the years Bleifer has engaged this employment in the consideration of diverse subjects, and to regard her simply as an innovator in paper is to miss the deeply felt and conveyed meanings of her artworks, the worldly concerns that motivated their production in the first place. Her various series are in fact collections of thoughts about life, like the pensées of a memoirist, perhaps, or the musings of a poet. The only difference is, they are made of paper rather than written on it.

Sandy Bleifer received her B.A. in Fine Arts at U.C.L.A. in 1962 and worked as an Artist in Residence, an art teacher, docent and publisher of curriculum materials in the arts. With the support of “Space”, a seminal Los Angeles gallery under the direction of Edward Den Lau, she exhibited and sold her work from the early ‘70s through 1997.

The artist’s work is in over 200 private and public collections worldwide. Her personal idiom began with silkscreen, collage and an exploration of of paper: a continuing discovery into its complex nature and its ability to serve as a metaphor for the world around us. Early in her career as an exhibiting artist, social and political activism crept into the mix. Soon she began creating art installations that became a focus and galvanizing force for the reconsideration of major historical events: the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the mid-1990s she focused her attention on a pivotal moment in Los Angeles’ contemporary history: the revitalization of downtown LA. Now in recent years, she is further imbuing her art with a pro-active agenda using interactive installations, video and community engagement with threads that can be seen in her prior aesthetic concerns – paper as a metaphor for life, environment and the human condition.