Dana Nechmad

Kaliner is pleased to present Dana Nechmad's inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery Holding On to Nothing Is Not the Same as Letting Go. The exhibition features drawings with embroidery on paper, textiles and a site specific drawing installation.

Dana Nechmad's work explores how our identity, gender and power structures are shaped by the stories and images we inherit. Working across drawing, textile and embroidery, Nechmad combines personal experiences with references to art history, and western cultural traditions, creating scenes in which the familiar narratives begin to unravel.

In this body of work, Nechmad returns to fragments of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture'symbols of authority. Rather than reconstructing these histories as coherent stories, she reimagines them through unexpected encounters and shifting relationships. Her figures inhabit a world where the past and present overlap, and where the boundaries between the personal and the historical remain uncertain.

As Maya Bamberger wrote in her essay about the exhibition (below), women have long appeared in art as representations of abstract ideals, from justice to liberty, while their lived experiences have often remained secondary. Nechmad places her women at the center of her compositions, giving them agency within scenes shaped by desire, struggle and force. They occupy an active role in the composition as they challenge these ideals and invite contradictory positions: vulnerable yet defiant, connected yet constrained, capable of both supporting and burdening one another.

The arch recurs throughout Dana Nechmad's exhibition: painted on the wall, embroidered on paper, and formed by drawn figures supporting one another. It recalls the order and authority of monumental architecture while marking a threshold between past and present, myth and lived experience. Within her personal mythology, this inherited form becomes less certain: fragmented bodies unsettle its apparent permanence, while holes pierced through paper give absence a physical presence, echoing the traces left by a memory or an idea that no longer holds. Where women sustain the structure, each figure supports the whole while remaining bound to her position within it. The opening promises passage, yet the arch depends on their staying in place.

Hair, so closely tied to a woman's identity and charged with associations of passion and desire, takes on another role in Nechmad's work. Braided, it becomes a rope or a tool extending from the body, connecting women or drawing them into entanglement. Nechmad plays with this symbolism: the strands remain visible, yet are concealed within the tightly woven form. Both a physical extension and almost a character in its own right, the braid unsettles the boundary between what belongs to her and what acts independently, deepening the imagery's enigmatic quality.

The canvas Nechmad uses in her work is submerged in deep dye for an extended period, then stretched across the floor. Working quickly with bleach, the artist reveals larger-than-life figures from within the fabric itself—a form of removal that paradoxically creates a positive presence, like a double negative.

In Holding on to Nothing Is Not the Same as Letting Go, tensions unfold through figures and objects caught between opposing forces. The title suggests that attachment and release are not simple opposites. What sustains us can also weigh us down; what we struggle to leave behind may remain part of who we are. Nechmad's figures navigate these contradictions without arriving at easy resolutions, reflecting the complicated ways personal experience becomes entangled with inherited expectations, memory, and the structures of power that shape our lives.

Dana Nechmad, who trained in Florence as an academic oil painter, copying the Old Masters — has in recent years turned to two historically domesticated media: pencil drawing and embroidery.

A woman bends forward under the weight, her braided hair dragging an enormous helmet behind her. The helmet is caught in a mesh of actual red thread that extends from her braid, embroidered into the drawing. In another scene nearby, a woman clings to an enormous severed arm and coils her braid around it. The arm, attached to no body, toys with a marionette of empty armor on red strings. Women stand atop classical architectural columns. They are no longer the caryatids bearing the structure, but pull and braid one another's hair to balance.

Women have often been used in art history as allegories representing abstract values like liberty or justice, while their flesh-and-blood counterparts were granted neither. Nechmad's women are doing something else. The man who triggered the event portrayed is absent from the images. Nechmad restages the scene with female protagonists alone. Man, as such, is only hinted at symbolically, as a phallic mountain, or an empty armor.

Nechmad's working process begins from an unsettling emotional seed, reaching for the imagery and material that would let it move from the personal into the arc of history. Playing with the narrative of what happened to her here and now, all sorts of figures surface in her mind. She quickly sketches them out, then dwells with the figures in a process of scaling, repetition, and duration in which they gradually slip from her grip and acquire symbolic attributes from other times and places. It is not despite but because of the Sisyphean labor of precise drawing that her imagination gains the structure it needs to wander freely. Nechmad anachronistically collages art histories into a cinematic register that surrounds the gallery space.

In this exhibition, Nechmad's compositions conjure chivalric reenactment such as the Giostra del Saracino, the jousting festival dating back to 1260 and still staged today in Arezzo, where knights charge at a mechanical armored figure. This turn belongs to a broader return to the Middle Ages in contemporary art, a return to representation that carried an ethical or theological message beyond its iconography. Why intervene in gendered power dynamics through a queendom of performative violence, and place these women in a past that granted them even fewer rights? I want to think here with Fredric Jameson's understanding of allegory as a solution to moments when underlying social contradictions demand forms of articulation that the semblance of the real, or the hermeticism of the symbol, cannot afford. Allegories deliver concealed messages that would otherwise be doomed to rejection.

In the Middle Ages, Christian exegesis, building in part on Talmudic hermeneutics, cultivated an interpretive method combining four levels: a literal reading of a historical event; an allegorical level, in which that event carries a theological symbol; a moral level, concerned with how one ought to act; and an anagogical spiritual level, concerned with its ultimate meaning within the final order of things. Jameson transposes this theological, medieval hermeneutic onto the ideological reading of contemporary imagery and texts, leading us to read the meaning from the tensions that arise between the four levels.

I will attempt here a four-level reading of these images as allegories, to linger with and trouble what the work composes for us, at the risk of undermining its secret power to slip past our collective defense mechanisms.

Perhaps this helmet-bearing woman was once at a scene of violence, and she finally stole from the knight the helmet that had shielded him. Why, then, is the helmet bigger than the woman carrying it? Does it shield anyone? Certainly not her. The armor's promise of protection was never addressed to the one now bearing its weight, a performance of power that protects no one. In the second level of allegorical reading, we see a woman appropriating power from the man who attacked her. Nechmad restaged the encounter, granted her protagonist agency, and even erased men. But when carrying this helmet, then/now, she/we still live in patriarchy — which leaves us only a binary choice: to hunt or be hunted, to be armed or silenced.

Yet, these women, as figured by Nechmad, are not only pictorial allegories. Piercing the paper with the needle, a medium in which she has no formal training, frees Nechmad from the technical mastery of her drawings. It allows for what artist Bracha Ettinger has called "trojan horses from the margins of consciousness that transgress the limits of the current Symbolic." The blood-red thread violently wounds the image. It is suddenly not even an image of anything. The burn of bleach exposes or is becoming their flesh. The living hair extends from the body and is wound into a braid — a living/dead rope, the tie that binds one body to the next, the textile that later wounds the image. At a certain point, Nechmad even grants her characters, or they seize, the freedom to step out of the scene she/we re/created for them.

In our last conversation, Nechmad and I realized that bringing together the language of drawing and the language of stitching, as the drawn braid, with its knot of contradictions, desire and its binding, beauty and pain, carries its meanings over into the real thread, is not only a proposal for balancing two artistic energies, but a proposal for other relations in the world. This, I suggest, is the actual danger of Nechmad's sewing needle.