Anna Socha VanMatre's paintings have been screaming to the viewers her shock and fear and hope since 1978. The realization that her post-September 11 works represent an extension of this cry for sanity, only makes their emotional statement more penetrating. Ms. VanMatre is a Polish born artist who constructs graphite paintings on monumental three-dimensional surfaces. Her works have been presented on many exhibitions in different countries and have been described by critics as "symphonies of blackness, gray and light" and a significant step in "liberating" the drawing idiom. At the exhibition in Jerusalem Center for the Arts, her installation was praised as much more then the series of static drawings, but instead "a thing of theatrical character, an interaction between the stage and the audience". Many of her paintings (some as large as 20 feet in height) utilize the potential of paper to be rolled, unrolled, torn, folded, and cut - not necessary confining the paper to a life sentence behind the glass. Titles such as HABITAT, LIMITS, TURBULENT TIMES, HOPE IN BLUE, NO, METAMORPHOSES, and BEYOND THE EARTH CURTINS reflect the artist's focus on the relation between humanity and our environment. It is a world with myriad shades of black and gray, brightness by shafts of white light, and a surprising use of color which illuminates the power of unfathomable inhumanity, yet also the power of beauty. The series NO, the title subject of her first New York show, has been one of the longest running series by Ms. VanMatre. Beginning in 1982, she stunned the public with the themes of nuclear proliferation in graphite on 10 foot three-dimensional paper. Through the late 80's and early 90's, industrial pollution and dangerous technologies were the focus. The horror of Chernobyl was the subject of NO in a group of 1989-94 gray and black monumental works on torn and cut paper. In 1996, the series entered a new phase with the addition of color, suggesting fire and serving in retrospect as an ominous prediction of the most recent graphite paintings. The 2001 version of the series says NO to terror and intolerance through a group of smaller three-dimensional vertical diptych collages framed and covered by glass.