Summer Exhibitions

12.08.2023 – 02.11.2023

Ziva Ben-Arav

Wings for the House

Ziva Ben-Arav makes her art in her house, in which art and life have merged. Her raw materials, taken from domestic life, include salt, rice, quinoa, eggshell fragments, glue, threads, and other items of daily life. For years Ziva made installations from available materials, which were usually organic. The results are the outcome of an understanding of material, delicacy of touch, and great creativity.

A fan and a wing
The huge object hanging from the center of the space looks like a giant lace fan to cool the air. The shape made its appearance in Ziva’s earlier works (made by an iron scorching paper or fabric). As she made art over the years, she began hanging “fans” made from organic materials; this fan is made of thread, quinoa, and “spines” of bamboo skewers.

Ziva expropriated the fan from its original purpose and made a gigantic hanging fan seeming to be planted in space, surrounded by a play of light and shadow. The installation facilitates a view through the fan while shadows are formed on the far wall.

The earliest known fans are screen fans and fixed leaf fans, waved by hand to cause a flow of cool air on the body and keep insects away. They were made of palm fronds or feathers. Alongside of the fan is a wing made of quinoa grains, hanging in the air as if it severed, but still seeming to be a continuation of the fan. The wing symbolizes hovering in the air as well as the need to fly high and move through the space.

This is a gaze from inside the house outward to the exterior expanses, perhaps mainly directed towards the mental and emotional expanses.

The wing and the fan reflect restoration and the attempt to patch together what has been ripped apart, to connect, glue, and create a whole. Ziva Ben-Arav’s art deconstructs the whole and then binds it together, building an extraordinary unity. The healing is not only a repair of physical fragments but a healing of the heart through art.



Efi Gen, Keren Weisshaus
 

Elisha Rubinoff

Accelerated image (ination)

Elisha Rubinoff has been working with wood for decades. His artworks are surprising and do not look like anything specific, do not describe anything from life as we know it. They originate from what is organic and familiar, then continue beyond into “otherness.” The works have no interface with practicality: they are art stretching out into the future, offering new possibilities, breaking through the limits of the known.

Rubinoff sculpts the wooden objects by hand. Viewers may try to identify the sculptures as belonging to flora or fauna, or perhaps the depths of the sea. The object remains enigmatic as viewers are drawn to its beauty, to the lace-like technique of carving in layers into the wood, sometimes integrating additional materials and infrequently adding color.

The saying “Nature speaks for itself” is only half-true. Nature “speaks” but does so through people and numerous cultural systems and translations.
Elisha’s works are not anthropocentric: humans are not their focus, but objects, which enable a blend. The wooden sculptures look like different categories welded together, such as furniture, animals, clothing, or instruments. They seem alive, but not in the way we are used to identifying.

When we try to clarify their nature, it seems they have intelligence and intention, with built-in extraterritorial character. A “chimera” is a category of organisms created from genetically engineered hybrids, the word originating from ancient Greek mythology. Over time it became the general category of fictional creatures whose body is comprised from typical limbs of several different species. What Elisha does with the material is a kind of chimera that he takes to an extreme, new hybridization of biology and culture, live and inanimate.

The new object brings the viewer face to face with the uncanny, a Freudian term for something that seems familiar but strange. The result is discomfort – the viewer senses attraction and recoil – an added essential character of the works.

Elisha’s sculptures seem to float, hardly holding on to the ground, evoking flight, a breeze, and transparencies. The various elements are connected but often one piece may envelop, penetrate, or wound the other, possessing potential for violence.

They are balanced precariously, almost impossibly, with a delicate connection to terra firma. The viewer feels a sensation of being a voyeur, peeking at the innards of something unnameable. 

The works are seductively beautiful, enabling viewers to “think outside the box,” to see “the other” as equals and perhaps ourselves as well. We encounter an object, a non-human sculpture with its own intelligence, which makes us think about ourselves. The sculptures seem deep and mysterious which is why they have no titles but only numbers, so that viewers can let their imagination roam.

 

“As a self-taught artist coming to the field with ‘fresh eyes,’ I am aware of the advantage of making art that is not influenced by any discourse, art group or institution, or overexposure. The series is fundamentally opposed to dichotomy, rises above and beyond issues of the division between art and craft and between artist and craftsman. Inspiration arrives from various worlds of content, some from fantasy and futurism, others are biology and engineering. I draw from what exists and imagine the future while enabling the areas to drift into each other.

“I acquired and honed my technical skills for decades. Since I was a boy, I have been curious about machines which I took apart then rebuilt their operating systems. At home, I was exposed to my mother’s embroidery, lace and crochet works. As a teenager, I tried wood carving and turning. My years of working in England for a company preserving and restoring ancient wooden buildings enabled me to study the manual carving of masters of wood. In my studio, I make my own art and also train generations of people who love wood and love to work in wood.”

Elisha Rubinoff (b. 1966)


Efi Gen, Keren Weisshaus
 

Eyal Sasson

Edge of the Whirlpool

Eyal Sasson’s paintings seem to jump out of the wall right on to us to lick our eyeballs, with a sensuous quality mixed with disgust. Sasson is inspired by animation and Japanese Manga, aesthetics rich in oversaturated colors, bordering on kitsch, challenging the Western aesthetic perceptions distinguishing between beautiful and ugly in a mix of attraction-repulsion.

In contrast to the painterly overflow evoking a sensation of overload and suffocation, the installation features falling pieces of paper evoking an atmosphere of wilting or sickness. The works have no clear directionality; with a close look, the differences blur between “flora” and “fauna,” interior and external organs, and foreground and background. The painting offers a different kind of organicness, as male and female mix in a sensuous festivity bringing up a feeling of nature gone wild, out of control like mutations escaped from a lab experiment.

The works made during the post-pandemic period in which people continued to stay at home and nature went wild once again arouses sensations of post-Apocalypse, doubly validated by Sasson’s decision to enlarge tiny portions of Dürer’s print “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

The enlargement process focuses an encouragement of identification of faces, heads, or animals, suddenly poking upwards to demand recognition, then sink back down again into the waves of the painting.

Sasson examines the act of seeing through deconstruction of the painting into its basic elements (color, form, movement, surface), and manipulating them. The surface itself is deconstructed through cutting and collapsing forward to expose its hidden reverse side. The cut brings in the dynamics of movement between back and front and two- and three-dimensions, like pop-up books in which shapes spring up to expose hidden expanses with every turn of the page.

 The acrylic on paper works facilitate freedom of movement within the painterly surface, while enlarging the painterly gestures gives a feeling of being dwarfed when facing the painting. The change of scale making miniscule objects into huge items seems like gazing through a microscope. The cutting acts in response to the painterly action: slow motion, precise and sharp in contrast to a rapid, free gesture, removing the extraneous to create a breathing space in contract to the suffocating surplus.


Efi Gen, Keren Weisshaus

Moran Kliger

Garden of Delights*

The primordial waters are located below the threshold of consciousness, where the snake’s seductions lurk, a place of sensuousness and basic drives. The figures that reappear on the slick bare spots are like human raw material that has not fully taken form. The figures in their generic almost androgynous shapes speak of the beginnings of humanity to the same extent that they signify a different possibility for humanity in the future.

“The work engages in myths of destruction,” states Kliger, “creation, destruction, and formation, a depiction of the time of the chaos. It is from this place of destruction that resurrection and rebirth alternate.” Kliger proposes a visual interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve through a series of drawings of primordial landscapes – “They are nowhere and everywhere, but under a closer look they hold the promise of destruction or disaster.”

The twisting snake arising from the midst of water and earth seems to be part of the “flesh” of the place, wrapping itself around trees and bodies, its presence suffusing everything.  The seduction is the possibility of choice between the instinctual and the moral, between the order of the Divine Father, and between the primordial chaos of the subconscious.

Allegorical figures and animals surround the Garden of Eden, referring to well-known masterpieces: here is the peacock from Pieter Paul Rubens’ painting, Gustav Courbet’s woman with the parrot, or the woman with the flute reminiscent of a work by Henri Rousseau.

The unique technique Kliger developed begins with smearing paint on paper which she uses as transfer paper. The technique creates surplus action, since it is possible to draw directly on a paper surface. Kliger distances herself from the drawing through the layer of the black transfer paper, the chaos of painterly potential which introduces an element of “dirt” formed by random hand pressures on the white surface, making present the artist’s fingerprint in the creation of the drawing.

The work as a whole constitutes a sort of attempt to create an alternative iconography and disrupt the mythology that we are accustomed to encounter through various cultural representations. This is a foundational story on the subject of the basic relationship networks between man and God, at the center of which is the issue of free choice – obeying and acceptance in contrast to revolt and disruption.  On the surface, it seems that it is a story of creating the universe, flora and fauna, earth and heavens and stars, Adam and Eve. It also embodies the promise of destruction, disaster and expulsion.  Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden and thus became mortals. With death awaiting them, they are liberated to live and realize their entire potential – for good and for evil.

* This work was exhibited at Traces VIII: The Eighth Biennale for Drawing in Israel, “More than One.” Curator: Irith Hadar



Efi Gen, Keren Weisshaus

Alicia Shahaf

Newborn

We are facing a newborn creature. It is not a winged creature, nor a hybrid of animal and plant, but a creature created by Artificial Intelligence according to instructions input by artist Alicia Shahaf. 

This creation made jointly, originating with the artist’s words to create the visual outcome produced by the program reflects the new possibilities embodied in the gap between thought and action, between “Let there be…” and “And there was…,” and in the translation from human/verbal language to algorithmic/visual language.

Artificial Intelligence is a sort of “black box” in terms of learning and drawing conclusions. The outcome enables a peek into the way in which AI decodes Shahaf’s request and the steps it takes to respond. The resulting image was “born” from a synthetic thinking machine that learns the artist’s style from her photographs.

The program proposed four different versions, of which one was selected for a continued process of refining precision.  The model was developed in a kind of accelerated and development in a kind of accelerated evolution, with repeated expansion and minimization until the artist confirmed the final result. Shahaf’s work with the AI software is similar to training: the program learns her unique preferences and style, and responds to it.

When observing the works themselves, the association immediately arises of a winged creature, an angelic structure with a fairy-like head, body and wings, composed of what looks like organic vegetative material, with aesthetics of botanical illustrations.

 The images constitute the “end point” selected from innumerable evolutionary possibilities in a process of artistic selection and precision. In many aspects, these hybrid creatures continue the pathway Shahaf marked out with her corpus of botanical photographs, enabling her to carve new paths through an unknown forest.

Efi Gen, Keren Weisshaus

דן בירנבוים

רישום

על גבי קיר במבואת הגלריה, מציג האמן והאדריכל דן בירנבוים רישומים נבחרים מתוך עבודות אחרונות. עבודתו הרישומית עסקה בעיקר בתיאור נוף, ישראלי. נופים אשר התעלמו בדרך כלל  מנוכחות אנושית. הפעם, נדמה שהאמן מביט אל תוכו. מתוך התנועה המיומנת של מכחול יבש  וצבע שחור על נייר, הוא מצליח להעביר אותנו דרך ציור עין, גם אל מה שהעין רואה (העין כמייצגת את המבט, שולחת בעקיפין גם אל דיון פילוסופי עמוק על המבט) [1]. אנחנו חשים את התנועה המתעקלת של היד ורואים את גלגל העין, אישון, דמות שנקלטה במבט. האדמה עליה ניצבים שלושה ברושים (מוטיב ביצירתו וסמל ישראלי) התעגלה באופן בוטח, עד שנדמה שכך יש לציירה. דמות נקלטת בעין, משוכפלת לדמויות רבות ואנחנו מתבוננים ברישום קהל רב של יחידים הנדמים כגופים אורגנים על צלחת פטרי במעבדה. הרישום נכנע לתנועה עגולה, טבעית, כמעט שלמה, שהופכת לבסיס, למקום ממנו נצרבים הדימויים,העין.  רישומיו של דן מאופיינים בתחושה דואלית אצל הצופה . תנועת המכחול לצד הקפאת הרגע ונדמה שאנחנו נמצאים על סיפו של דבר מה שיש לבחון אותו שוב. רגע חשוב. הבחירה בטכניקה שהיא כמעט וקליגרפית, יוצרת רגע ציורי, יחידי, מרתק.  אלו מתעגלים יחדיו לכדי סממנים חדשים ונוספים ביצירה עשירה, רבת שנים ומרתקת של אמן ישראלי שמצליח לזקק עבודתו כקליגרף יפני, ועם זאת לייצר תחושה מקומית השייכת לכאן ועכשיו.  
[1]  “הנראה והבלתי נראה” (1964) -מוריס מרלו-פונטי העמיד את הגוף במרכז החוויה התפיסתית של היותנו בעולם. לדעתו, ראייה היא חוויה גופנית, בדרך של דואליות והיפוך: גופי הרואה הוא גם הגוף הנראה על ידי האחר. חוויית היסוד של היותי בעולם היא זו של סובייקט צופה שהוא גם נצפה. גם לאקאן ( 1964, סמינר 11) התייחס להתבוננות: המביט הוא חלק מתמונה רחבה יותר, המבליעה בה את המביט בהיותה כוללת את הצופה שהוא תמיד גם נצפה, ותמיד נמצא גם בשדה המבט של האחר.

ללא כותרת 2019 | אקריליק על נייר 42/30 ס"מ
ללא כותרת 2019 | אקריליק על נייר 42/30 ס"מ
ללא כותרת 2019 | אקריליק על נייר 42/30 ס"מ
ללא כותרת 2019 | אקריליק על נייר 42/30 ס"מ
Play Video

Summer Exhibitions 
12.08.2023 – 02.11.2023

Catalogue
Video

Ziva Ben-Arav

Wings for the House

Ziva Ben-Arav makes her art in her house, in which art and life have merged. Her raw materials, taken from domestic life, include salt, rice, quinoa, eggshell fragments, glue, threads, and other items of daily life. For years Ziva made installations from available materials, which were usually organic. The results are the outcome of an understanding of material, delicacy of touch, and great creativity.

A fan and a wing

The huge object hanging from the center of the space looks like a giant lace fan to cool the air. The shape made its appearance in Ziva’s earlier works (made by an iron scorching paper or fabric). As she made art over the years, she began hanging “fans” made from organic materials; this fan is made of thread, quinoa, and “spines” of bamboo skewers.

Ziva expropriated the fan from its original purpose and made a gigantic hanging fan seeming to be planted in space, surrounded by a play of light and shadow. The installation facilitates a view through the fan while shadows are formed on the far wall. The earliest known fans are screen fans and fixed leaf fans, waved by hand to cause a flow of cool air on the body and keep insects away. They were made of palm fronds or feathers. Alongside of the fan is a wing made of quinoa grains, hanging in the air as if it severed, but still seeming to be a continuation of the fan. The wing symbolizes hovering in the air as well as the need to fly high and move through the space.

This is a gaze from inside the house outward to the exterior expanses, perhaps mainly directed towards the mental and emotional expanses.

The wing and the fan reflect restoration and the attempt to patch together what has been ripped apart, to connect, glue, and create a whole. Ziva Ben-Arav’s art deconstructs the whole and then binds it together, building an extraordinary unity. The healing is not only a repair of physical fragments but a healing of the heart through art.

Efi Gen, Keren Weisshaus

Elisha Rubinoff

Accelerated image(ination)

Elisha Rubinoff has been working with wood for decades. His artworks are surprising and do not look like anything specific, do not describe anything from life as we know it. They originate from what is organic and familiar, then continue beyond into “otherness.” The works have no interface with practicality: they are art stretching out into the future, offering new possibilities, breaking through the limits of the known.

Rubinoff sculpts the wooden objects by hand. Viewers may try to identify the sculptures as belonging to flora or fauna, or perhaps the depths of the sea. The object remains enigmatic as viewers are drawn to its beauty, to the lace-like technique of carving in layers into the wood, sometimes integrating additional materials and infrequently adding color.

The saying “Nature speaks for itself” is only half-true. Nature “speaks” but does so through people and numerous cultural systems and translations. Elisha’s works are not anthropocentric: humans are not their focus, but objects, which enable a blend. The wooden sculptures look like different categories welded together, such as furniture, animals, clothing, or instruments. They seem alive, but not in the way we are used to identifying. When we try to clarify their nature, it seems they have intelligence and intention, with built-in extraterritorial character. A “chimera” is a category of organisms created from genetically engineered hybrids, the word originating from ancient Greek mythology. Over time it became the general category of fictional creatures whose body is comprised from typical limbs of several different species. What Elisha does with the material is a kind of chimera that he takes to an extreme, new hybridization of biology and culture, live and inanimate. 

The new object brings the viewer face to face with the uncanny, a Freudian term for something that seems familiar but strange. The result is discomfort – the viewer senses attraction and recoil – an added essential character of the works.

Elisha’s sculptures seem to float, hardly holding on to the ground, evoking flight, a breeze, and transparencies. The various elements are connected but often one piece may envelop, penetrate, or wound the other, possessing potential for violence. They are balanced precariously, almost impossibly, with a delicate connection to terra firma. The viewer feels a sensation of being a voyeur, peeking at the innards of something unnameable. 

The works are seductively beautiful, enabling viewers to “think outside the box,” to see “the other” as equals and perhaps ourselves as well. We encounter an object, a non-human sculpture with its own intelligence, which makes us think about ourselves. The sculptures seem deep and mysterious which is why they have no titles but only numbers, so that viewers can let their imagination roam.

“As a self-taught artist coming to the field with ‘fresh eyes,’ I am aware of the advantage of making art that is not influenced by any discourse, art group or institution, or overexposure. The series is fundamentally opposed to dichotomy, rises above and beyond issues of the division between art and craft and between artist and craftsman. Inspiration arrives from various worlds of content, some from fantasy and futurism, others are biology and engineering. I draw from what exists and imagine the future while enabling the areas to drift into each other.

“I acquired and honed my technical skills for decades. Since I was a boy, I have been curious about machines which I took apart then rebuilt their operating systems. At home, I was exposed to my mother’s embroidery, lace and crochet works. As a teenager, I tried wood carving and turning. My years of working in England for a company preserving and restoring ancient wooden buildings enabled me to study the manual carving of masters of wood. In my studio, I make my own art and also train generations of people who love wood and love to work in wood.”

Elisha Rubinoff (b. 1966)

Efi Gen, Keren Weisshaus

Eyal Sasson

Edge of the Whirlpool

Eyal Sasson’s paintings seem to jump out of the wall right on to us to lick our eyeballs, with a sensuous quality mixed with disgust. Sasson is inspired by animation and Japanese Manga, aesthetics rich in oversaturated colors, bordering on kitsch, challenging the Western aesthetic perceptions distinguishing between beautiful and ugly in a mix of attraction-repulsion. In contrast to the painterly overflow evoking a sensation of overload and suffocation, the installation features falling pieces of paper evoking an atmosphere of wilting or sickness. The works have no clear directionality; with a close look, the differences blur between “flora” and “fauna,” interior and external organs, and foreground and background. The painting offers a different kind of organicness, as male and female mix in a sensuous festivity bringing up a feeling of nature gone wild, out of control like mutations escaped from a lab experiment.

The works made during the post-pandemic period in which people continued to stay at home and nature went wild once again arouses sensations of post-Apocalypse, doubly validated by Sasson’s decision to enlarge tiny portions of Dürer’s print “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” The enlargement process focuses an encouragement of identification of faces, heads, or animals, suddenly poking upwards to demand recognition, then sink back down again into the waves of the painting.

Sasson examines the act of seeing through deconstruction of the painting into its basic elements (color, form, movement, surface), and manipulating them. The surface itself is deconstructed through cutting and collapsing forward to expose its hidden reverse side. The cut brings in the dynamics of movement between back and front and two- and three-dimensions, like pop-up books in which shapes spring up to expose hidden expanses with every turn of the page. The acrylic on paper works facilitate freedom of movement within the painterly surface, while enlarging the painterly gestures gives a feeling of being dwarfed when facing the painting. The change of scale making miniscule objects into huge items seems like gazing through a microscope. The cutting acts in response to the painterly action: slow motion, precise and sharp in contrast to a rapid, free gesture, removing the extraneous to create a breathing space in contract to the suffocating surplus.

Efi Gen, Keren Weisshaus

Moran Kliger

Garden of Delights*

The primordial waters are located below the threshold of consciousness, where the snake’s seductions lurk, a place of sensuousness and basic drives. The figures that reappear on the slick bare spots are like human raw material that has not fully taken form. The figures in their generic almost androgynous shapes speak of the beginnings of humanity to the same extent that they signify a different possibility for humanity in the future.

“The work engages in myths of destruction,” states Kliger, “creation, destruction, and formation, a depiction of the time of the chaos. It is from this place of destruction that resurrection and rebirth alternate.” Kliger proposes a visual interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve through a series of drawings of primordial landscapes – “They are nowhere and everywhere, but under a closer look they hold the promise of destruction or disaster.”

The twisting snake arising from the midst of water and earth seems to be part of the “flesh” of the place, wrapping itself around trees and bodies, its presence suffusing everything.  The seduction is the possibility of choice between the instinctual and the moral, between the order of the Divine Father, and between the primordial chaos of the subconscious. Allegorical figures and animals surround the Garden of Eden, referring to well-known masterpieces: here is the peacock from Pieter Paul Rubens’ painting, Gustav Courbet’s woman with the parrot, or the woman with the flute reminiscent of a work by Henri Rousseau.

The unique technique Kliger developed begins with smearing paint on paper which she uses as transfer paper. The technique creates surplus action, since it is possible to draw directly on a paper surface. Kliger distances herself from the drawing through the layer of the black transfer paper, the chaos of painterly potential which introduces an element of “dirt” formed by random hand pressures on the white surface, making present the artist’s fingerprint in the creation of the drawing.

The work as a whole constitutes a sort of attempt to create an alternative iconography and disrupt the mythology that we are accustomed to encounter through various cultural representations. This is a foundational story on the subject of the basic relationship networks between man and God, at the center of which is the issue of free choice – obeying and acceptance in contrast to revolt and disruption.  On the surface, it seems that it is a story of creating the universe, flora and fauna, earth and heavens and stars, Adam and Eve. It also embodies the promise of destruction, disaster and expulsion.  Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden and thus became mortals. With death awaiting them, they are liberated to live and realize their entire potential – for good and for evil.

* This work was exhibited at Traces VIII: The Eighth Biennale for Drawing in Israel, “More than One.”
Curator: Irith Hadar

Efi Gen, Keren Weisshaus

Alicia Shahaf

Newborn

We are facing a newborn creature. It is not a winged creature, nor a hybrid of animal and plant, but a creature created by Artificial Intelligence according to instructions input by artist Alicia Shahaf. This creation made jointly, originating with the artist’s words to create the visual outcome produced by the program reflects the new possibilities embodied in the gap between thought and action, between “Let there be…” and “And there was…,” and in the translation from human/verbal language to algorithmic/visual language.

Artificial Intelligence is a sort of “black box” in terms of learning and drawing conclusions. The outcome enables a peek into the way in which AI decodes Shahaf’s request and the steps it takes to respond. The resulting image was “born” from a synthetic thinking machine that learns the artist’s style from her photographs. The program proposed four different versions, of which one was selected for a continued process of refining precision.  The model was developed in a kind of accelerated and development in a kind of accelerated evolution, with repeated expansion and minimization until the artist confirmed the final result. Shahaf’s work with the AI software is similar to training: the program learns her unique preferences and style, and responds to it.

When observing the works themselves, the association immediately arises of a winged creature, an angelic structure with a fairy-like head, body and wings, composed of what looks like organic vegetative material, with aesthetics of botanical illustrations. The images constitute the “end point” selected from innumerable evolutionary possibilities in a process of artistic selection and precision. In many aspects, these hybrid creatures continue the pathway Shahaf marked out with her corpus of botanical photographs, enabling her to carve new paths through an unknown forest.

Efi Gen, Keren Weisshaus

Play Video
Play Video
Play Video

Accessibility Toolbar