Cuadernos de Trabajo
Dalia Gal Sverdlin
Curator:Merav Shin Ben Alon
The exhibition Cuadernos de trabajo is a continuation and evolution of the artist’s project The Central Library - a solo exhibition (Tel Aviv Artists House, 2020) and an artist’s book (2022). In these projects, Dalia Gal Sverdlin explored the relationship between empty sketchbooks and the library’s shelves of knowledge. In the current project, the artist expands her visual research into new materiality, raising new questions about the physical and metaphorical dimensions of the concept of the book—both as a whole and in its absence.
The work process began with a sketchbook—a physical object of movement and sequence: spreads, folds and a constant reference to the preceding and following page. Gal Sverdlin worked in a mixed-media technique: acrylic, pencil, ink, and masking tape, persistently refusing to tear out pages or stop until the entire book was filled. For the artist, the books serve as an ordered structure amid a reality of overload and fragmentation: they provide a working framework that organizes time and space, dictating rhythm and perseverance.
The exhibition comprises three bodies of work created between 2023 and 2025.
At its center is a series of large-scale acrylic paintings created after October 7th. These paintings are built through a rhythm that merges bodily action—layers of covering, erasure, and correction. One might say that here the artist performs a “notebook-ization”—moving from working in sketchbooks to working in physical space, giving presence to the act of working in books while simultaneously deconstructing and denying it.
In another axis, Gal SverdlinGal Sverdlin presents selected photographs of spreads from the sketchbooks. These photographs function as a kind of curatorial gesture by the artist and stand as new artworks in their own right.
Both axes—the painting and the photography—serve as transformative mechanisms for her: through them, she “extracts” the drawings from the sketchbooks and generates new works from them.
The newest series in the exhibition, Cuadernos de trabajo (2025), focuses on dismantled sketchbooks, marking a turning point in her process and terminology.
Unexpectedly, the act of dismantling does not occur after the work is done, but rather serves as the starting point. Gal Sverdlin unbinds the gatherings, disassembles the pages, and returns them to what they were: single sheets of paper carrying memory.
At this point, the painting process begins— counter to the continuity that characterized the work in the sketchbooks. Here, the order unravels, collapses, and disintegrates.
The continuity that once characterized working in the sketchbooks is disrupted, and the term “sketchbook” no longer adequately defines the work process. It is redefined by a new concept: Work Notebooks.
In Cuadernos de trabajo, Dalia Gal Sverdlin traces the tension between the whole and the fragmented. Through a repetitive act of craft, she binds and unbinds the notebooks, as if attempting to momentarily grasp the whole, within a space that tends to keep disintegrate.
Merav Shinn Ben-Alon, June 2025
* The term Cuadernos de trabajo is a familiar term in Spanish used to describe personal notebooks that serve as diaries, sketchbooks, and spaces for reflections and creative processes
Dalia Gal Sverdlin was born in Mexico City in 1968 and made Aliya in 1984. She is a graduate of the Midrasha School of Art and also studied photography at Icart Photo, Paris, as well as humanities and gender studies at Tel Aviv University. In 2020, she held a solo exhibition at Tel Aviv Artists House and has participated in exhibitions both in Israel and abroad. Her artist’s book, The Central Library, was published in 2022 and launched at the Artport Artbook Fair.