FISHING

Gottlieb liked to depict working people – water carriers, bakers, fishermen. However, he never reduced the theme to ordinary genre scenes. He rather treated it as an opportunity to experiment with painting and a metaphor for the human condition where physical effort acquires a universal dimension.

Fishing, a painting from the collection of Lviv-based doctor Marek Reichenstein, shows three men in a boat, struggling with the sea. The subdued pastel palette does not alleviate the dramatic nature of the scene but highlights the plasticity of the shapes balancing on the verge of figurativeness and abstraction. Geometrised bodies are not individual portraits but a synthetic signifier of physical effort and drudgery. The diagonal composition amplifies the impression of instability and tension – between equilibrium and collapse, individual effort and collective action.