New Members 2024

As part of a long-standing tradition, the Artists’ House continues to welcome new members to the Jerusalem Artists Association every year, opening the annual exhibition season with a display of their works. This year, three new members have joined the association: Hadas Duchan, Sergey Maximishin and Raya Manobla.

Hadas Duchan | And the Breath Came

In the exhibition “And the Breath Came,” Hadas Duchan—a graduate of the Department of Fine Arts, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, and an artist at the Jerusalem Artists’ Studios—creates a drawing environment after Ezekiel’s Vision of Dry Bones, in which the prophet predicts the resurrection of the dead, as the dry human bones in the valley ahead of him reassemble and return to life. Throughout Jewish history, the vision was given a variety of interpretations, from a text foretelling a future event described literally, to allegorical readings regarding it as symbolic. The macabre yet hopeful content sparked the imagination of many, and its enigmatic quality made for its interpretation in creative manners, in keeping with the spirit of the time. In the exhibition, the vision takes shape before our eyes, pointing to the magical and animistic possibilities innate to the remains of life and to nature of which we are a part.

Sergey Maximishin | Draw Me a Photograph

Sergey Maximishin has been a photojournalist for the last three decades, and is twice a World Press Photo winner. For two years now he has been living in Jerusalem, where he arrived with his wife following the Russia-Ukraine war and threats posed due to his critical journalist approach towards the Russian regime. The photographs selected for the exhibition represent the artistic facet of Maximishin’s oeuvre: unstaged but tightly composed, bold in color, and arranged in a way reminiscent of the Renaissance and Baroque paintings at the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. Taken around the world, the images depict men and women working, eating, praying, and at leisure, accompanied by animals, in rich visual settings, although sometimes materialistically poor.

Raya Manobla | Thinking about Collage

A graduate of the Jerusalem Studio School’s master class in figurative-realistic painting, Raya Manobla’s collage is an evolution, an elaboration, and a honing of the painterly practice with which she began her artistic journey. From the colored papers she collects, she creates complex compositions in an intuitive, profound, continuous, and focused process, in which great import is reserved for each location, shade, texture, and the interrelations between the various papers that make up the collage. The works are inspired by totem sculptures, illustrations for children’s books, and music, forming flat wall sculptures, which raise painterly as well as sculptural questions and are charged with ritual and magical meanings.

Dveer Shaked