“...Ruth
Mordecai’s work is monumental and assertive. It’s impact
is immediate... Neither humanism nor intimacy was sacrificed with her movement
away from the figure. By creating outside the imagery known and familiar to her,
she has taken on a new authority. At the heart of that authority are the strength, energy and humility to take risks...”
Meredith Fife Day, Visual Arts writer and
artist
“...Mordecai offers bold sculptures and works on paper,linked by their
common
concern with energy that makes the materials seem as if they’re
evolving on the spot. Whether working in clay, steel or oil paints, her art has a purity and force...”
Christine Temin, Boston Globe
“...Shlien has a marvelous eye for
new artists but these sculptures and drawings were no ordinary debut...the artist obviously had a strong, mature
sensibility. I wasn’t surprised when the Boston Museum of Fine
Arts bought one of the drawings from the show ... I am impressed by her move toward more stable forms that are partly body,
partly building. I don’t know another artist who is exploring this
territory, or doing “architectonic” sculpture that has such heartfelt human
resonances...”
John Walsh, Director Emeritus, J.Paul Getty
Museum, Malibu, California
"To my mind there are few if any American
sculptors as acutely attuned as she is, or better endowed imaginatively
and technically, to address certain issues of real import. In our era of "postmodern" anxiety
and an incoherent combination of brittle intellectuality and undisguised
commercialism in the arts, Ruth Mordecai is following her inner daimon
toward what I take to be the central issue: exploring in strictly contemporary
visual idiom the large and perennial human questions-- philosophical
and religious questions, the question of the human community and our
shared symbols."
Dr. Roger Lipsey, Author of An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth
Century Art (Shambala, 1988) Former faculty Princeton University and University
of Texas
“...Perhaps more basic is a gutsy calligraphic
sense, the ability to lay a strong stroke on paper with what Asian masters call “strength of stomach”...As powerful as Mordecai’s line is her colorist sense... paintings, red, black, and grey set against dawn-sky colors, can only be described as seductively beautiful.
Marty Carlock, Art New England
“Ruth Mordecai is a child of liberal American Judaism: She thinks simultaneously and without contradiction, in specifically Jewish and broadly
universal terms; her spirituality is both Jewishly focussed and non-denominational.
The Seven Series (1990)” ... “which followed after her Holy Ark,
was intended as a non-denominational shaping of space in which to celebrate and meditate.
One thinks immediately of Rothko’s Chapel paintings in Houston, Texas:
one is surrounded by rich, dark and calm color and simplified form...”
“...Moreover, these heroically scaled works"... "are reminiscent
of Rothko, in our being surrounded by them”... “They are simultaneously
sources of reflection and celebration. They restore order to the universe in the
aftermath of the multiple horrors in this century which have torn the world apart.”
Dr. Ori Z. Soltes, former Director, Klutznick
Jewish Museum, Washington, DC
Author of Fixing the World, Jewish American Painters in the Twentieth
Century,
Brandeis University Press, 2003
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