..."She puts together signs and symbols, abstract concepts, familiar shapes, banal associations, rough materials, industrial paints and multicolored lights together with cultural, ethnic, religious and science fiction references. She draws upon collective consciousness and subconscious memory and experience and processes everything through the highly subjective data of her own individuality. The image she thus builds strives to wholeness and the work itself becomes an opulent show, oscillating between convention and invention."

In her art Miriam Neiger-Fleischmann portrays "emotional experience" in different dimensions, from "Books" through traditional paintings to huge installations. She uses various media - watercolors on paper, acrylic, oil colors, industrial colors and found objects. The idea dictates the materials used, and the techniques are suited to the materials. But in all her works the same expressive language appears in rich, strong colors and in dynamic movement.

"I create an artistic object which will activate subconscious - emotional factors in the spectator. I want to "stage" the created feeling through certain color and form combinations which, I feel, work in a similar way (though on different levels) on most people perhaps through a collective subconscious. I see my work as creating an emotional environment which catapults the spectator into internal events."

Reviews

THE WORLD AROUND US

(July 2) - Dozens of paintings now at the Jerusalem Artists House are about landscape, urban and otherwise.
Those of Bezalel-trained Miriam Neiger-Fleischman (b. Slovakia 1948, here since 1949), are apocalyptic, full of Sturm und Drang. Most of her post-modernist expressionist works, particularly the huge ones, hint at coming disasters represented by pairs of images: horsemen, vultures, dogs. Her writhing symbols of Jerusalem's hilly environs are also meant to be the setting for mysterious coming events, but their jolly high-color belies this. In any case I liked best a small minimalist oil in strong complementary oranges and blues that has no pretensions other than to be a good painting.

Neiger writes poetically about her intentions; so do many other painters on view, while others post quotes from Bonnard or Matisse. I've always thought it prudent to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

Meir Ronnen, The Jerusalem Post
August 2000

IN THE FRAME

..."Miriam Neiger-Fleischmann's huge paintings, full of might, are surprising in their ability to delay the radiation of their worrisome energy, and we need not say that they are "apocalyptic." The small format, to my taste, becomes sealed and unable to withstand the load of her emotional density, and in contrast to what is most commonly accepted, the doubled "space" provides light and pictorial depth. The
"Apocalypse" in these paintings is not "prophecy" but rather a sixth sense that every reasonable Jerusalemite has been gifted with, symbolized not by "broken carts" or mute angels of history, but by "creatures" in battle stance, invading from outer space,
without knowing if they are "harbingers of good or messengers of evil." The Neigerian activism is not only the "prophetic" nature of the poetess, but is rather an outstanding trait of her brushwork...
.
Rachel Laurie, Works "Nidbach 8"; Miriam Neiger-Fleischmann, "A Day is Coming," paintings; Judith Appleton, portraits; Artists House".

Albert Suissa,
From Kol Hair - Achbar Hair
special weekend supplement Jerusalem entertainment guide
7.7.2000, p. 21
Translated from the Hebrew by Judith Appleton

THE POMEGRANATE, THE BEAST AND THE AUTUMN LIGHTS
ON THE OEUVRE OF MIRIAM NEIGER-FLEISCHMANN

..."Even in Miriam Neiger-Fleischmann's sophisticated installations and in the gloomy and oppressive paintings of her Apocalypse series one is readily aware of the presence of a little girl playing with colors. An unmistakable childlike sensuousness envelopes her entire oeuvre: It is the colorfulness of children, or, more precisely, OF little girls: strong pinks, purples and azures, gold dust and candy colors. Even for the most ironic viewer, encountering these colors arouses a memory of a child's contact with colors -- direct and unmediated, a daub that is a bedaubing, a swirl that is a whirl. When children are drawing, in moments of especially intense concentration and pleasure, they stick out their tongues, flicking and licking, as if to remind themselves of the nearness of intense color to the taste and texture of good food. This is the realm from which Neiger-Fleischmann's oeuvre emanates and to which it returns...". click here to read the article

By Ariel Hirschfeld
Translated from the Hebrew by Esther Hecht