Arie Aroch

Works from the Israel Museum

Opening: Saturday, 01.11.2008. Closing: Saturday, 13.12.2008

Curator: Timna Seligman

Marking one hundred years since the birth of Arie Aroch, this exhibition includes works from the Israel Museum collection, as well as from the private collection of the Aroch family on extended loan to the Israel Museum. It aims to celebrate an artist whose importance and influence can still be seen in the local artistic landscape. Incorporating pieces from his early years as a student in Paris to works made shortly before his death in 1974, the exhibition spans his career and focuses on the range of mediums in which he excelled, including oil on canvas; oil, pencil and collage on wood and paper; painted reliefs; and oil stick on reproductions. Aroch created a full visual lexicon and the works in this exhibition allow the spectator to follow the stylistic process of abstraction and formal development that justifies his place as a father of Israeli Art
Gallery talk (in Hebrew) - 9.12.08 at 6pm

Meni Salama - ז.כ.ר

Opening: Saturday, 01.11.2008. Closing: Saturday, 13.12.2008

Curator: Moshe Kron

The extensive exhibition of the painter Meni Salama spreads over two decades of his work. The Hebrew name of the exhibition – ז.כ.ר – has a dual meaning of both masculine and memory.
Meni Salama usually utilizes surfaces that are ‘abandoned’ - such as shelves, kitchen doors, wooden or metal boards and worn out book covers. He paints with great sensitivity, giving room and respecting the traces of the previous lives of these surfaces, while maintaining a dialogue between his own life or inner world and the sediments or finger prints of their past.
Salama is an Israeli painter. The landscape of local being, the fragility of existence and fear of death, find their expression in symbols and contents that appear and fade away in his works.
As an excellent painter, having a rare gift to lift a pencil and let the painting absorb its might, his work is poetic, purified and economical. His small scale drawing also exemplifies a choice of intimacy that invites the viewer to approach closer to the delicate, painful tissues of our lives.
The male, expected to respond in one of two options: “fight or flight", selects "flight" in this exhibition – evading confrontation. Escaping from the danger of death, he surrenders to his lust for life. The skeleton and skull, repeatedly re-appearing in Salama's work, represent the male who tries to renounce the characteristics of his identity as a "man of valour".

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue.

Avi Sabah

Solo exhibition for the winner of the of the Osnat Mozes young artist painting Prize for 2008

Opening: Saturday, 01.11.2008. Closing: Saturday, 13.12.2008

Avi Sabah's paintings may be viewed as hybrid spaces, where different worlds meet to create a paradoxical space which questions the possibility of capturing a memory and trapping it in material.
By means of physical actions on the painting material – pouring, rubbing, impressing – Sabah defines the painting as merely a surface, a concrete defined place lacking a soul, yet at the same time he aspires to imbue this shell with a new spirit.Sabah’s cultural environment is complex and multi-layered: on the one hand, it seems that he strives to restore a Catholic pathos to the painting by giving the abstract textual sign a tormented, wounded, bleeding body. On the other hand, he seems to embrace the poor Israeli environment in particular, as if trying to acknowledge artificial Formica as a symbol for plain unpretentious authenticity.Sabah's original, exciting and disturbing work evolves from the permanent transfer between cultural contradictions and clashes arising from incompatibilities of materials that consume each other.
Based on his achievements in painting and confidence in his continued and unique contribution to Israeli art, the committee has chosen to grant Avi Sabah with the Osnat Mozes young artist prize for painting, 2008.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue.

Dganit Ben-Admon - Bleach

2nd exhibition in the 15th Nidbach series

Opening: Saturday, 01.11.2008. Closing: Saturday, 13.12.2008

Curator: Smadar Levy

A thorough cleaning of the house, to clean deep down to the foundations of the house: rugs are being rolled, furniture and objects are piled up one on top of the other, clearing wall and floor surfaces for scrubbing and washing. Bleach, that rinses it all, destroys and digests any remnant of previous activity, cleansing, polishing, filling the air with the smell of ammonia. Dganit Ben-Admon’s exhibition “Bleach” gleams of cleanliness, establishing an almost sterile space – like that of her grandmother’s house. While attentively leaning on the past, this domestic space squeezes itself into the corridor, where photographs are placed next to sculptural objects: flowerpots holding climbing or carnivorous plants, "pastelas" (Moroccan soft foot-rests) for sitting or a couch in the garden, a rug, a bat and some snakes - mostly whitened, as if they were rinsed by bleach.This setting creates a disturbed, melancholic domestic space, in which neither the obsessive cleaning, nor the shine of the polished floor, can disguise or dim the fears and frozen, haunted, silenced moments. As in her previous sculptural works, where she undermined the private and the domestic confronting the "standard" with the sick and weakened, here too Ben-Admon continues her dialogue with the past. Despite the polished façade she tries to return to what exists underneath – before the cleaning or after it, beneath the house's foundations – to extract that same establishing Punctum, that very same perforation or trauma which can not be verbalized or rationally understood.