Current Exhibitions

Talia Israeli’s exhibition comprises works ranging between black and white. Large schematic paintings on canvas are joined by contrasting landscape drawings on small-format wooden boards. Sampling reproductions of Renaissance frescos, the Christian motifs are subtracted from the image in an attempt to secularize it: to be left with the landscape alone and examine its imprint, and at the same time—to meet the absence, to preserve a historical reference point to the myth, the yearning for a coveted place, to stretch it to a space that extends between “Disney” and film noir. Israeli delves into these gaps through the hypnotizing power of a winding freehand line in black, which etches the scenery’s silent scream, and concurrently—through hybrid painting, which recognizes perspective as the great achievement of the Renaissance, yet turns back to flattening via graffiti technique. Teasers of Christian iconography enable Israeli to reflect on the status of the stain, which breaks free from the religious aura, turning to the abstract.

In her new exhibition, Magdalena Hefetz presents two large-scale works from the past two years: an installation alluding to One Thousand and One Nights, consisting of 1,001 cups produced in traditional handwork, and a ball-like work, clad with pottery fragments.

For the central installation, Hefetz chose the most basic form taught in pottery classes—the cylinder, and its primary purpose—the cup. She imprinted a number on each cup in ascending order, thereby giving each its own uniqueness within the heap of seemingly identical items. The association with the Holocaust is not accidental. The number is intended to erase individual identity. Piled up, the cups create a human landscape; a collection of individuals, who form a group that shares a common fate, despite their uniqueness.

In his exhibition “Us”, Oded Zaidel presents new paintings, individual and group portraits, most of them created in the shadow of COVID-19. The paintings are all based on photographs taken by the artist’s wife; selfies in the spirit of the current era, which he transforms into paintings on canvas in the spirit of famous scenes and portraits from the history of art.

Zaidel expands his engagement with depiction of figures, after years in which he was identified primarily with the painting of sites devoid of human presence. The portraits surrender the influence of or reference to Ori Reisman’s paintings: scarce use of shading, flattening of the cloth folds, minimum engagement with facial features, as little as necessary to characterize the figure, and nothing more. Zaidel’s paintings, however, have an idiosyncrasy of their own. It is not direct painting of a model, but painting from photographs taken in domestic and private circumstances, or at exhibition openings.

Lital Mor’s works reveal ostensibly insignificant moments, elevated to the level of representative presence, which is foreign to the viewer in the context of an art exhibition. The images challenge the hierarchical perception of “high” and “low,” confronting the viewer with such notions as boredom, repetition, mediocrity, and compromise. Like Meursault, the protagonist of Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger, Mor strives to “shatter the harmony of the day” by pointing at the temporary, transient, negligible. Her works depict routine moments, often evoking a sense of déjà-vu. She diligently identifies and draws attention to the moments of “nothingness” that pass us by in the race of daily life, charging abstract moments with existential meaning.