Nocturnal Wakefulness

Winner of the 2022 Osnat Mozes Painting Prize for a Young Artist

In their statement, the prize committee members noted: Rachel Rabinovitch’s paintings affect the viewer in a wide range of aspects: physical, emotional, and intellectual. Prima facie, it looks like current painting, which draws a line between Symbolism and Surrealism, thereby introducing themes pertaining to Jewish tradition and the external “natural world” that is being studied. But the main feeling arising from her paintings is one of a private, fantastic, at times morbid world, which strives to explore the duration of observation and the dynamic nature of the eye in its transition from the general to the specific and from one detail to another as an eventful journey. This experience generates an intimacy teeming with revelations between the viewer and the work. Oscillating between matter and darkness, between presence and absence, the eye is lured into a fresh and confident painting, embarking on a quest between the general and the individual, the cultural and the natural.

Jury: Eti Jacobi, Eliyahu Fatal, and Eyal Sasson