“A New Face” features five artists who are ‘new faces’ in the Israeli art scene, presenting their search for fresh encounters with the human face and their focus on human observation. Their works do not transmit a specific story or an outrageous message; rather, they reveal a probing gaze, one that is altogether different from the instant glances that dominate our daily lives. Mundane activities such as reading a book, trying on a new robe, or an aimless wandering around the city, all reappear through new modes of attention and observation. These works do not seek to didactically explain away things, but question the many ways in which we can look at reality over time, and still discover it anew.
 

The works themselves refuse to be immediately understood or to be easily digested; they demand that we slow down and pay attention. They draw personal and social meaning from the relationship between the subject and her surrounding, whether it is domestic, such as in Reut Patinkin’s works, or urban, as in Elizabeta Zaidner’s works. We, the viewers, are drawn once to the details and once to the whole, observing from up close to far away, ultimately projecting ourselves and entering into the world of the painting. In Gil Zellner’s paintings, discovering the right distance between the painted figure and the one who observes her (formerly the painter and now the viewer), invites us to transform strangeness into intimacy. Avner Levinson’s sculptures are like tactile landscapes that activate the beholders by urging us to walk around them and discover additional points of view, shifting relationships between masses and changing points of gravity. And finally, Gili Levy’s boldly colorful landscapes, despite being fully internal and emotional, manage to place us in a constant flow between the depth of the painting and its surface. The variety of perspective and approaches in these five artists’ works encourages us to seek out fresh perspectives within our own world.

This group of artists is on a common search to endow the present with historical depth, maintaining constant dialogue with the long history of art. Precisely by their facing of the demands proposed by this tradition, all five artists have emerged with their own individual style and language. Each and every one of them has chosen to deal with challenges shared by artists for centuries—the need to represent emotive portraits through objective materiality, or to present movement, growth, and liveliness in a plastic medium.

As the German thinker G. E. Lessing has proclaimed, visual arts (contrary to literature and poetry which are temporal arts), are spatial, and are therefore limited in their ability to represent change over time. The works in this show try to address this restriction by creating lively, emanating images. The touch of a hand on the soft clay, the rhythm of the paintbrush, or the drips of paint—are all imprinted with human presence. These works document an intensive process—a journey without a predictable end. They try to capture a moment of discovery, of formation, of the highly delicate balance between that which is present and that which is about to collapse, disappear, or withdraw from our eyes. As such, they open to us the possibility of a new way of seeing.
 

Tamar Mayer

The Department for Art History, University of Chicago

(Translation by Leeron Tur-Kaspa)