Open a Gate

Peter Jacob Maltz, the Winner of the 2017 Miron Sima Prize for the Visual Arts, offers a gateway into a physical and metaphysical space that illuminates the relationship between the person and the place, and creates on the one hand a humane link between the place as a designer of identity and on the other, a bearer of promise. Maltz views the sense of “uprooting” as a fundamental feature of the artist, which sustains his work and the act of creating art in general and his current exhibition emphasize and deepen the discussion on the subject.

A walk through the exhibition reveals a collection of observations, flashes of conscious thought, which cracks its shell and reveals its
own material, creating a monochromatic and ascetic, perhaps religious, landscape. All along, Maltz maintains a tension between the control of
the raw materials and the possibility of allowing them to lead him. The movement flows from word to drawing, drawing to painting, painting
to object and finally from object to sculpture. This journey comes together as sculptural-spatial-pectoral installation, which among other
things, seeks to charge the architecture, the arches and gateways, of the Artists’ House with meaning and create a spiritual or perhaps
romantic connection to the idea of the place, as the historical Bezalel building.