Shlomo Serry, Pink Future , 2007, colour print by ink injection

New Members 2008

Sonia Abramovich , Shimrit Baer , Shlomo Serry , Gennady Zechmaister , Jeff Friedman , Shulamit Near , Rachel Shajar , Lee-He Shulov

Curator: Shai Azoulay, Marcelo Lauber

11 Sep — 25 October, 2008

This year’s “New Members” exhibition presents eight artists, each greatly different from the other, who joined as members to the Jerusalem Association of Painters and Sculptors. While assembling the exhibition, we visited each of the artists at their studios in order to gain a closer acquaintance with their work. These meetings turned into a voyage of discovery through dialogue, revealing varied and individually diverse thematic fields.
The current exhibition provides the opportunity to experience a large body of works in different styles and techniques that while being free from trends and fashions remain valid and relevant to the contemporary art scene.Shulamit Near’s paintings are created through a long process of observation, in which the image is gradually formed through the many changes occurring in their subject. The works, highly meticulous and realistic, outline a seemingly optimistic, saturated and vivid landscape, but a hidden content-related stratum reveals the appearance of a ghost town where the presence of man has been erased.For Shlomo Serry his photographs are research instruments, which he uses to examine the changing form of the view and to reflect the local aggressive culture.Shimrit Baer’s intimate drawings mark the tension between the touch of the paper and the expanse depicted in the act of drawing. Shimrit uses this suspense to create a collection of joined, fist-sized portraits, which while appearing restrained, in fact carry within them an intensity through which the restraint is breachedThe paintings by Genna Zechmaister are laden with images taken from various sources; mythology, comics, children’s stories and figures from contemporary consumer culture are all bound together into layered visions of narrative richness, joy and humor.

The works by Lee He Shulov depict building sites, with purportedly no position taken regarding the construction of the “new”. In fact, they focus precisely on the actions of the one causing the change – man, and present him as part of the construction apparatus, whose identity has been erased.

Rachel Shajar uses snippets of various mythologies which she dilutes with private images, in order to create large scale canvases painted in a lively and contemporary language.

Through her paintings Sonia Abramovich relates to a landscape of yearning for the familiar culture of her childhood and of personal memories. The observation becomes a voyage towards the heritage of melancholic painting and its dark regions.

Jeff Friedman’s paintings deal with presence and absence. Using past and present portraits of his family, he depicts an emotional continuum that disregards the boundaries of time and place.

Shai Azoulay and Marcelo Lauber

Participating Artists