While the art world has seen many trends come and go during the past decades, some artists
                have held firm to a more individualistic path. That is certainly true of Pnina Granirer, who,
                though we celebrate her forty year long career, shows absolutely no sign of letting up. In fact,
                the last ten years have revealed a remarkable development of new ideas and techniques which
                draw from her various interests, travels and insights.

                The fact that Pnina Granirer works in a variety of media and techniques is appropriate to the
                subject matter she develops. Her highly developed graphic and linear capabilities likewise have
                served her well in interpreting the forms she creates. Although she began her career mainly in
                printmaking, there has been consistent development of other mixed media and graphic procedures
                into an expanding repertoire of techniques. In the 1980s, however, Granirer began to move away
                from printmaking towards the pleasure of direct mark making on canvas, in pictures that continued
                to retain a strong underpinning of drawing.

                The practice of painting has, since the mid-19th century, been polarized to some extent between
                artists in the tradition of Cezanne, Van Gogh or Courbet, who created imagery largely with the
                paint itself, and those who retained a stronger element of draughtmanship, like Matisse and Picasso.
                Granirer's background in drawing, printmaking and illustrational techniques has led her to gravitate
                towards the latter, although she also demonstrates an almost Expressionist brushwork, as in the
                watercolours done in the 1960s while living in Israel and particularly in the poppy paintings of
                1995-96, as well as in the most recent black and white abstracts.

                These practices have developed alongside her more formally constructed compositions which, as
                in the shaped canvases of the Alhambra series, seem to have an ironic relationship to hard edge
                minimalism. The geometric elements in Granirer's work, however, tend to be iconic rather than
                reductionist. The crucial difference is that Granirer's work contains allegories and a consciousness
                of the mythic, a sensibility which is disallowed by non-objective painting. Granirer, whose vision,
                like Surrealism and Lyrical Abstraction, is a poetic one, has long been developing the shape of
                her painting in this direction.

                The 1970s and 80s have given us a variety of models after the era of Pop, Minimalism and
                conceptualism, movements which strove to deny virtuosity and the heroic. Although aware of
                the ideology of the minimalist and conceptual schools, Granirer's art is foremost a lyrical one. By
                painting drawing and by utilizing modeling, perspective and other pictorial devices including
                collage, she augments her passages of brushwork with memories, allegories and simulacra.
                However, in the 1995 paintings of poppies and also in her most  recent black and white abstracts,
                we see the modeling and drawing challenged by painterly elements that denote a new stage in
                the artist's development.

                One of Pnina Granirer's favourite artists is Jim Dine, the American artist usually appended to the
                Pop art movement. Dine, who denies any connection to soup cans and cartoon characters,
                unabashedly uses drawing in his paintings, concentrating on rendering the 'object'. Granirer
                feels intuitively close to this reinstalling of the icon and to renewing its positive aspect as a
                shaman's tool. Thus she gives her paintings an expressive power and a sense of dynamism which
                serve the impulses and subjects she tackles.

                Again like Dine, Granirer has a finely tuned ability to isolate certain elements from both the
                human and natural environments she inhabits. This is especially true in works evoking the
                coastal rainforest and also ones which recall many of the ancient cultures she travels to, such
                as Japan, Spain, Israel and Egypt.

                Often she succeeds in fusing these ancient impulses and impressions with our contemporary
                world, as in theStone Goddess Series, where images of Nike, the Victory of Samothrace are
                enclosed in the eroded rock formations of Gabriola Island. These islands, with their hint of
                a Mediterranean climate and vegetation, have long been one of her main sources of inspiration,
                spiritual nourishment and a series of unusual subjects, like the abandoned quarry that served
                as a visual cue for a series in the late 198Os.

                Like many West Coast artists, Granirer draws  attention to the sanctity of the natural environment
                from which the paintings emerge. She has long felt empathy with the landscape and Native cultures
                associated with the Northwest Coast. In the I981Cannibal Birds, she combined totemic elements
                with images of the rainforest that is their home and in works done from visits to Gabriola Island,
                Granirer conjured  dreamlike apparitions from the coastal rock formations.

                Indeed, her works constantly betray a belief in images which reflect  the universality of humanity;
                she has the ability to both draw from deep ties  to the cultures of the Old World, even the ancient
                or prehistoric ones, and to simultaneously transmute them into something uniquely West Coast.
                Granirer  has become a truly Canadian artist; this can be seen in the evolution of her work from
                the first tentative stays in Montreal in the 1960s,  to her permanent  move to Vancouver,
                later in the decade.

                Being born in Romania, and later having lived in the Middle East, Pnina Granirer has naturally
                been inclined to also draw deeply on her own cultural roots. She is heir to a cultural lineage which
                lead us back to the time of Byzantium, the leading influence on eastern European culture for
                more than a thousand years Her fluid line, graceful shape-making and sense of decorative
                patterning are all indigenous to the cultures of central and eastern Europe, characteristics which
                have influenced Western art more than is acknowledged. Think of the richness of Oriental art
                or the gilded frescoes of Ravenna and you will have an idea of where the origin of Granirer's work,
                its DNA in fact, can be found.

                But these cultural dialogues are never offered up blatantly. More  importantly, they exist apart
                from any didactic program. Because she is a humanist, she never yields poetic effect to enact a
                social science agenda. Even in a project such as The Trials of Eve, her art is enhanced by the
                feminist theme rather than merely existing as a prop for a theory or grievance, evidenced in
                much current deconstructionist work. Having survived the effects of two 20th century ideologies
                in Europe, Granirer has little use for propaganda, but she does possess a finely tuned moral
                sensibility which gives enhanced veracity to the statements contained in her works.

                Pnina Granirer rarely relies for long on specific influences, because she rapidly synthesizes all of
                them, incorporating impulses both ancient and modern with her compositions. She has, in a sense,
                navigated unscathed through art history, no doubt a result of having a seemingly unending flow of
                original ideas. Granirer has always known that her path would lead elsewhere than where the
                orthodoxy deemed fit and decided years ago to maintain a personal poetic vision and to stay the
                course wherever it took her.

                This unwillingness to either commercialize on the one hand, or rely on conceptual theorizing to
                get grants on the other, has led Granirer into a condition experienced especially by painters today.
                She represents the type of artist who became marginalized, not just because she was a woman
                raising  her family, or because she used 'populist' themes, but because she never made the
                proper genuflections towards the current socio-critical theories, so dominant today. It appears
                Granirer's only transgression was following the dictates of her imagination. In the current intellectual
                atmosphere, which frowns on the idea of 'beauty',an attitude completely alien to her sensibility,
                Granirer's art belies any traces of skeptical nihilism, by retaining the pleasure principle, the
                removal of which is so essential to acceptance by theoretical purists. She is an eclectic artist and
                makes no apology for it, nor should she.

                The Richmond Art Gallery deserves credit for not buckling to any ideological trends and for giving
                Pnina Granirer the opportunity to share with us the varied tapestry of her life that has been, and
                will continue to be an inspiration to artists and the public alike. It is a life worth celebrating.

                Gregg Simpson, curator, 1997