Rebecca Brodskis (b. 1988 in France) lives and works in Paris. She spent most of her childhood travelling and living between France and Morocco. Brodskis studied painting at the Ateliers des Beaux Arts de la Ville de Paris and at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design in London, graduating in 2010. In 2015, she also completed a Master’s degree in Sociology, focusing her research on the themes of vulnerabilities and social crisis. Exploring the borders of the sensible world, Brodskis’ work evolves between conscious and unconscious spaces, leading to a reflection on the existence, the self and the otherness. The idea of being in an in-between is very prominent in Brodskis work, this intermediate space at the cross-roads of empirical reality and imagination, order and disorder, materialism and spirituality, determinism and freedom.

 

Solo exhibitions  include (Upcoming) Echoes of Now, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, West Palm Beach (2025); (Upcoming) Solo Exhibition, Septième Gallery, Cotonou, Benin (2025);  (Upcoming) Solo Exhibition, Fabienne Lévy Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland (2025);  (Upcoming) Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Palm Beach, USA (2024); Dilemma: Rebecca Brodskis and Friends, Bastille Design Center, Paris, France (2024) Let’s talk about you and me,  Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, UK (2022); Cuturi Gallery, Singapore (2022); The Passengers, Koenig zwei gallery, Vienna, Austria (2022); équilibres, Fabienne Levy Gallery, Lausanne (2022); Effet Mirroir, Septieme Gallery, Paris, France (2021); La danse de l’absurde, Galeria Anna Marra, Rome (2021); Arrêt Sur Image, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, UK (2021); Tomorrow Is Another Day, Steve Turner, LA, USA (2020); Fragments of Life, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2020); Galeriste with Hors Cadre, Paris, France (2019); Septième Galerie, Paris, France (2019); Unsettled disorders, Canopy Gallery, Netanya (2019); Dépendance, Gallery Mario Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany (2019); and Drifting Singularities, Sputnik Gallery, Tel Aviv (2017). 

Groups of women embrace and encircle one another, their limbs creating balletic shapes against softly bruising backgrounds. Echoes of Now, a solo exhibition by Rebecca Brodskis at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, West Palm Beach, is an exploration of the essence of love and touch as an universal language.

 

While Brodskis’ subjects are typically drawn from her imagination, these latest paintings are based on photographs of dancers who performed at the Bastille Design Center in Paris on the occasion of her collaborative exhibition with dancer Lilach Pnina Livne. In part they are an attempt to reconnect and commemorate that moment, which Brodskis cites as a turning point in her practice, but they also transcend the performance to take on a life of their own. As with all of Brodskis’ portraits, the figures are not so much individuals as archetypes, all vaguely reminiscent of one another so that they could be siblings or multiple versions of one self. The focus is more on body language and shape, the points at which they meet and the spaces between them. In one painting, the dancers appear languidly lying back on a blue surface, their legs kicked up into the air, heels touching. In another, one woman bends backwards over another dancer’s back, her feet lifting off the ground, her chin tilted in full surrender, their palms gently clasped.

 

Brodskis has previously been known for her flat graphical style, but in these works, we see a progression towards a more layered approach. The backdrops are no longer a single block colour, but a shifting plane of different hues that seems to capture a sense of movement, warmth and energy between the dancers. Take, for instance, the painting in which four dancers are positioned in a loosely circular shape. Their hands are suspended, reaching to touch each other’s faces. We understand this to be a moment already passed: the figures are frozen in time, their ashen skin tone adding a spectral quality, as if they are slowly fading from existence. At the same time, the connections they made, the places where their bodies moved and came together, linger through visible brushstrokes that appear almost like heat waves or air currents in the golden background, softening the figures’ silhouettes and blurring the boundaries between past, present and future.