Communicating Vessels: the Plates and Glasses Avraham Ofek

Avraham Ofek’s (1935–1990) Plates and Glass Works is dedicated to a less familiar, highly fragile part of the artist’s oeuvre: painting on plates and glass. Occasionally, from the early 1960s until his final period of work in the 1980s, Ofek engaged in these two bodies of work, which share a folklorist nature, stylized language, decorative patterns, craftsmanship, small dimensions, an affinity with Jewish sources, and a functional potential (the plate as well as the amulet)—features that partly characterized his major work as well.

This modest exhibition is thus devoted to Ofek’s plates and glass works. If one considers it by the “communicating vessels” principle (whereby homogeneous liquid contained in connected vessels will always balance out to the same level in all containers), then one may discern that Ofek’s spirit has been infused into these bodies of work in whole. They surrender the hallmarks of his art since the outset of his artistic career in the kibbutz; the impact of man’s relationships with nature and culture, which he addressed in his drawings and paintings; an explicit link to his conceptual work from his daysinthe Leviathan group, which were typified by aprimitivisthieroglyphic style; the incorporation of religious Jewish texts and motifs; and the influence of popular art.

Ron Bartos