Dora Holzhandler's universe of lovers, gardens, markets, birds and flowers is recognisably the one we daily inhabit, but it is also transfigured by the light of another dimension, that of the mystic and poet.

Historically central to the Jewish experience is the feeling of loss and exile with its opposite - a deep rootedness in home, family, community and tradition. In her paintings of family groups the nature of a whole culture and its social and familiar relationships is suggested through the most assured and economical handling of design. The sensitive placing of people - their tender gestures and attitudes - and dishes, implements, candles within the picture, communicates an insight of everyone and everything being in the right place in an essentially perfect order.

Dora Holzhandler recalls, 'on Friday night, my mother lit candles to commemorate the Sabbath evening. There was a white tablecloth and we ate chicken soup or gefilte fish'. Other recollections are of 'the grey cold of winder as a background to a crowd of Jewish ladies picking and haggling over a pile of chickens...rabbis with velvet hats and side-curls.'

The pleasure a child has in a happy home is that experienced by spectators of these paintings. In the words of Eric Newton in The Guardian, hers 'are pictures invented by a mother but painted by a child - a sophisticated but immensely amiable child!"

Neither does the mother ignore adult love. Great assurance of form, design and colour, is characteristic of her large oil depictions of 'Lovers', naked couples recline - and float - on couches and pillows of audaciously varied and rich abstract designs. Walls, ceilings and floor reverberate further with extraordinary counterpointed patternings.

The first and large part of this exhibition is devoted to the artist's childhood; the second part evokes different aspects of Israeli and Jewish life, following her recent and first visit to the Holy Land.

In graceful, celebratory painting with complex decorative pattternings and structural harmonies, she depicts the many scenes and facets that most impressed and moved her: the life of city markets; Arab street-traders; members of the Hassidic community; the seaside at Eilat and the underwater observatory there; Seder meals; heraldic Lions on Ziongate; churches, mosques and synagogues; the Wailing Wall; lovers in Jerusalem; and her first view of that city, from a 'fantastic garden with almond and pepper trees - suddenly I saw the golden walls of Jerusalem - it was incredibly beautiful'.

She has painted a view of the Montefiore market in Jerusalem, which reminded her deeply of the Ridley Road market of the North London of her childhood, except here 'they had a little synagogue, like an open shop, with people praying with their tallises (prayer shawls) on'. Such an experience, she says, was like returning to her spiritual roots.

She stresses that for her 'art is not travelogue. The important thing is the spiritual experience, the inner world.' Recalling the varied daily scenes and the people she encountered in Israel, she says she felt a strong sense of familiarity common to many Diaspora Jews - 'All around it was my paintings come to life! The Jewishness of life is exactly the same in Israel as in London or Poland or New York.'

Philip Vann (1989)

Philip Vann is a freelance writer. He has written articles about modern and contemporary artists which have appeared in The Royal Academy Magazine, Modern Painters, The Jewish Chronicle Magazine, the Antique Collector, The Artist's and Illustrator's Magazine, The Artist, Art and Artists, Arts Review, Contemporary Review and The Economist.