The Shell and The Bird

This exhibition revolves mainly around winged creatures: birds, owls, angels. Hanna’s flying creatures are made in an almost forgotten technique (in contemporary Israeli art) – the woodcut. In our time, artists have moved away from stone and wood, but it appears that we are in need of these elements more than they are in need of us. For stone and wood are agents of the spirit of life, of deep time, of growth processes and movement. Wood is a living material that lives, that grows, that breathes and dies. Stone too allows us to hear the sound of time. Limestone is after all a remnant of marine life-forms such as Hanna’s ammonite, which disintegrated after death and became a mineral. Hanna’s limestone owl stands in place, but it also glides to the depths of time and to the depths of the sea.

Hanna Peiser Ben-David is among the few, and perhaps one of the last artists in Israel belonging to the local modernist tradition of woodcut printmaking, which started a hundred years ago. From this point of view, an exhibition of woodcuts is in itself a remnant – a sort of “living fossil” as the paleontologists put it – of a magnificent local modernist tradition.