New Members 2009

 The exhibition presents works by four artists, new members of the Jerusalem Association of Painters and Sculptors: four artists who are greatly different from one another, but yet are connected by a very fine thread.

The works of Meydad Eliyahu, the youngest in the group, intentionally move between the abstract and the figurative. The series Battle Views, painted during the last IDF operation inGaza, creates a ‘new nature’ – fed by observations of torn patches of reality and memory which he then metaphorically echoes. The deliberate use of substance and materiality, as a ‘concrete’ emergence within the studio, creates a sense of a dual presence – imaginary and real.

Ronen Siman Tov strolls through sea and desert in his paintings, as if on a spiritual journey in which life and death are significantly present. The wide spaces that open in his works reveal allegorical places – fruits of imagination or of a dream, where a lonely character encounters its own self. Together with the ‘anemic’ brush work, the sea and desert define the painting as the outcome of a quest for shards of eternity, as a sublime moment within which exists the world of painting, testifying at the same time to the absence, the limitations and lacks of this medium itself.

In his series of black and white scenery photographs, Max Epstein is preoccupied by the validity of delusion. The photographs serve as a ‘stage set’ for a life-size sculpture of a jackal. By means of positioning, Epstein re-directs a real encounter with the animal within theJerusalem landscape, using it as a means to examine the relationship between observer and object, between observer and photograph. The sculpture, as a tactile embodiment of the animal, interrupts the sequence of observation and invites the spectator to create his own, renewed, interpretation.

The set in the work of Avi Sabah seems to have been totally dismantled and reassembled, completely disregarding it’s original order. Layer upon layer of views and slices of views have been glued together, using contrasting colors, portraying daylight and dark night and combining the translucent and the opaque, together resulting in a three-dimensional, multicultural image.