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Looking Through The Walls

Artist Avraham Loewenthal moves from Southfield to Tzfat with his unique art.

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vraham Loewenthal has
seen through the walls.
Be they brick, be they
wood, the 26-year-old for-
mer Southfield resident and Aki-
va graduate knows when the
surface of walls are peeled away,
there lies layer and layer of truth.
There are truths that separate
us, truths that provide structure
in our lives and values that re-
mind us that for every wall is a
foundation, and in the case of the
Jewish people, that foundation is
the Torah.
This is what one sees in Mr.
Loewenthal's art. There is deep-
er meaning in everything in this
young artist's work. Helping us
all look for deeper meaning in our
lives is what Mr. Loewenthal
hopes his art helps us with. Re-
cently, Mr. Loewenthal, who
graduated from the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago, opened
a gallery in the artists' quarter of
Tzfat, Israel.
Many Jews, be they young or
old, still learn Torah or the words
of the sages with one another in
the tradition of chavrusah, or one
on one. One gets the impression
from Mr. Loewenthal, whose gen-
tle, soft-spoken soul suggests a
man at peace with his spiritual-
ity, that his chavrusah is the
paint, the wood, the brush and
the other media he uses in art
form.
That art form by and large con-
sists of wood frames and ladder-
like pieces of wood layered over
by paints, letters in Hebrew,
pieces of wallpaper that were long
ago used on a real wall. If the
pages of a book were opened up
and placed in front of one's eyes,
it would be difficult to read the
message. The same sort of illu-
sion is important in reading Mr.
Loewenthal's work. His works
are like a sky filled with stars in
a seemingly unorganized fashion.
But when we look at individual
constellations, we find depth and
detail and meaning. With Mr.
Loewenthal, the layers are in the
work we see.
"I attempt to see through the
surface," Mr. Loewenthal said
while visiting his parents Dr. Lar-
ry and Shirley Loewenthal over
Passover. "Every nick and scratch
that marks an attempt to see
through a wall becomes a cele-
bration of the wall itself and of
our ability to be conscious of that
which is beyond our grasp. I am
interested in the inside surface
details of our experience, which
is a dialogue between our limit-
less consciousness and our limit-
ed experience."
His most recent work was in-

An example of the ladder-
style "wall" he crafts.

Avraham Loewenthal
(background with beard) with
his friends and artists In Tzfat.

spired by the biblical sto-
ry of Jacob's ladder,
where a dream stretches
from earth to heaven.
His Tzfat gallery is the setting
for his works, both finished and
in progress. The outside part of
the gallery, a courtyard-like set-
ting, is reserved for artists look-
ing for an opportunity to hang
their work in public. For many,
it's their first opportunity.
Mr. Loewenthal's works have
hung in museums, galleries and
private collections from Royal
Oak to the Janice Charach Ep-
stein Museum/Gallery at the JCC
to the Knesset in Jerusalem and
the Arad Museum in Arad, Israel.
He took part in the Arad Arts
Project, an artist-in-residence
program in the Negev desert. He
attended the Yeshiva Dvar

Yerushalayim in Jerusalem and
also graduated with distinction
from the University of Michigan
with a degree in psychology.
"I've always been a religious
Jew," he said. "But I came to Is-
rael to find a community where
I could grow as an artist and a
person. In Tzfat, everything came
together. I'm an abstract artist
using a Jewish form of art. The
type of art form I use shows that
what we see on the surface can
be can illusion, and it's not until
we look deeper, do we find more
meaning."
His concept of the walls came
from his academic training in
Chicago, what he calls a "city of
walls."