Umm el-Fahem Art Gallery, The Artists' Incubator.
Curators: Galia Bar Or and Haneen Abed.

In this exhibition, created during a time of war, the paintings long to break into space but remain bound by their flatness. The imagery is corporeal and fragmented: a large head bowed to the earth, a hand attempting to stem a flood of water, a body buried in sand, a plume of smoke plummeting downward. These works echo a sense of heaviness and helplessness.
The tension between the energetic, the violent, the bursting, and the dominant, versus the heavy, the static, and the swallowed, exists in both the imagery and the form—sculptures that seek to take over the space yet slightly resemble a stage set. In the final piece created for the exhibition, a hand connected to a foot bursts through a hole in the wall. In this work, one can see a transition from stagnation to a breakthrough. The painting succeeds in taking action.

Photos: Yigal Pardo