Meira Grossinger’s exhibit “Human Cell” is a site specific installation built from wooden cargo boxes. These boxes enclose figures that are made from used materials – human detritus like remnants of clothes, old newspaper, broken furniture, iron net and more, skillfully forming half naked, sensual body parts. This process of sewing and knitting, connects together the different elements, that are recycled into objects conveying feelings and ideas.

Louise Bourgeois, the world known sculptress, is a source of inspiration for Grossinger. Through her sensual use of materials to create fragmented figural elements, especially in her works “Cells”, that were created during the nineties of the twentieth century, Bourgeois conveys her childhood difficulties and also her feminine experiences during adulthood. In this exhibit Grossinger’s “Human Cells” combine both figurative and abstract elements to form an installation where the whole room is in itself one big cell,one whole space encompassing smaller cells, in everyone of which there is a certain activity going on. Touches of of knitting and embroidery of lace convey a pathetic attempt to create a make-believe home atmosphere. These wooden boxes used for packing and moving also relate to generations of Jewish vagrancy, and to the general misery of vagrancy in our world.

The way by which Grossinger exhibits bodily parts as if they were human spare-parts, echoes Kazuo Ishiguro’s book “Never Let Me Go”  describing a morbid futuristic situation where people are cloned for the sake of serving as spare-parts.

In Grossinger’s exhibit there is an ambiguous feeling of both sheltering and confinement. The figurative fragments try to find shelter but are enclosed in cages. Dealing yet again with the human body reflects her unrelenting interest in the human condition and the origin of pain.