Dora Holzhandler

the long version

Dora Holzhandler's paintings are rooted in the mystical perception of reality and depict a timeless Jewish world, often with a Buddhist quality. The twin strands of Holzhandler's spiritual identity - Jewish and Buddhist - are strongly evidenced in her extraordinary work and explored in this superb volume, the first monograph on the art of Dora Holzhandler. Holzhandler's richly decorative paintings of everyday, often specifically Jewish, life, are reminiscent of Polish folk art, Indian and Persian miniatures and Roman mosaics. Inspired by Allen Ginsberg's poetry, Jack Kerouac's Buddhist-Catholic novels, Aldous Huxley's study of visionary perception and LSD-transfigured ways of seeing, and essays on the mystical path by a Catholic monk, Dora Holzhandler draws no distinction between the sacred and mundane.