Helen Bershad, Melach

While the camera had freed the artist, the abstract expressionists freed the artist's thinking from all sorts of constrictions and old rules.
-Helen Bershad

Melach -a Hebrew word meaning "salt” -is a powerful, domineering work in which large areas of expressive colors and gestural shapes are locked into space by heavy black outlines.

Bershad, born in Philadelphia, is a graduate of Moore College of Art & Design. She worked in New York as an illustrator in 1956, before taking time off from painting to raise a family. Her first show, held at the Marian Locks Gallery in 1978, sold out. Woodmere organized a retro-spective of her work in 1997.