ABOUT | My Site 9

Artist Statement

A curator once told me, "You do what you feel you need to do. We’ll find the context later". I still think about that, because of course, there is always a context. If you are working from something real inside yourself, it will inevitably meet the world outside. You don’t have to decide in advance what the work is "about". Maybe this is why I have never been very concerned with staying within one medium, or repeating a recognizable kind of work. Over the years different questions have led me to painting, drawing, sculpture and public space, and to very different bodies of work. I don’t think they need to look alike in order to belong to the same practice. If the search behind them is real, the connection is already there.

What matters to me is reaching the point where something enters the work that I can feel. I don’t have a very good word for it. Emotion, energy, creativity, maybe all of them? maybe none. I only know that when a work has not moved me, it will never really move anyone else either.

Maybe this is also why my work tends to become simpler rather than more complicated. The world around us is complicated enough. We are constantly trying to make sense of more information, more images, more opinions, more things demanding our attention. At some point we lose control of it. I don’t want to reproduce that complexity in the studio. I’m happy when I manage to get to something simple, to a pure emotion. When that is there, people seem to connect to it very easily.

It is also how I know when a work is finished. There is a moment when the essence is there. The work moves me, and I stop. Anything I add after that is decoration / noise.

And what I feel while making something is not necessarily what somebody else will feel looking at it. Art doesn’t work like a message that has to arrive intact. Something can be made in one century, in one culture, for one reason, and move somebody centuries later for a completely different reason. Think of an African mask in a European museum. Whatever it means to the person standing in front of it may have very little to do with the emotion or purpose that brought it into existence. And still, something happens.

We talk a lot today about consciousness and creativity, especially now that machines have entered the conversation. I find both words very difficult to hold onto. Everybody talks about consciousness, but try to define it. Creativity is not much easier. In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a simple test. A person communicates without seeing who (or what) is on the other side, and has to decide whether they are communicating with another human being or a machine. If the machine can make you believe there is a person there, the distinction suddenly becomes less simple. Today we sit in front of computers and have conversations that can feel human. We respond to what comes back. We may even feel something. Whether there is consciousness on the other side is another question, but even consciousness turns out to be something much easier to recognize, or imagine we recognize, than to define.

Creativity isn’t much easier. We want it to produce something new, but if something were completely new, with no connection to anything we had ever seen or experienced, it probably wouldn’t communicate with us at all. There has to be a thread connecting it to something, to a culture, a memory, an image, or simply to some shared human experience. The new is never completely new. Even Warhol, who deliberately made work in a very mechanical way, is interesting because you can feel how he thought. You can almost hear his mind working. I think we look for that in art: the decisions, the mistakes, the things that changed along the way. When everything has been resolved and polished into a perfect product, very often there is nothing left for me to enter.

I want to preserve those traces in my own work. A bronze sculpture should somehow remember the thin piece of wire it began with; a painting can keep a mistake if the mistake belongs there, etc. I don’t want to hide the road in order to present the destination.

Does this mean a machine cannot make something that moves us? I think it can. A machine can fool us, surprise us, and probably make us feel something very real. People have always been moved by objects without needing access to the person who made them. There is that painting of the crying boy that has been reproduced and sold everywhere. People buy it and are moved by it without having any idea who painted it. That emotion is no less real because they don’t know. There is room for all of it. For Warhol and Sunday painters, for bronze and pixels, for an anonymous object and an image made by a machine. I don’t feel a need to decide which one is allowed to move us.

But that is a different question from why I make art. I make art because I want to connect to that place in myself. I want to follow the search until all the unnecessary things fall away and something remains that feels true and simple. I don’t know whether to call it emotion, creativity, energy or consciousness. The name is probably the least interesting part.

Born in Tel Aviv, 1962

Studied art at Wizo Art School, Tel Aviv 1987-1992, Lived in New York, assistant to artist Karl Appel

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2026 - A Muslim, a Christian and a Jew, the Jewish Museum, Vienna, Austria

2025 - Floating Columns, Nicole Gnesa Galerie Kunstberatung, München, Germany

2024 - Convergence, Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel

2023 - M.C.J, Nicole Gnesa Galerie Kunstberatung, München, Germany

2021 - Picnic, Zemack contemporary art, Tel Aviv, Israel

2019 - A Muslim, a Christian and a Jew,

Ons' Lieve Heer op Solder Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

2018 - You & Me, a Billboard project for Lenbachplatz, München, Germany

2018 - A Muslim, a Christian and a Jew, the Jewish Museum, Munich, Germany

2017 - Lexus Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel

2016 - A Muslim a Christian and a Jew, Jewish Museum, Berlin, Germany

Looking at you / talking to myself, Zemack contemporary art, Tel Aviv, Israel

From Andy Warhol to Contemporary Art, Haifa Museum of Art, Israel

2015 - "Three painters, a rock star, a young girl and a psychoanalyst in one room", MANA Contemporary, New Jersey, U.S.

The best of Eran Shakine, 21st Century gallery, Geneva, Switzerland

2014 - Graffitigirl, Zemack Contemporary Art Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel

2013 - Art for Sale/Sail, Special project for fashion night TLV, Tel Aviv, Israel

2012 - Sunny Side Up, Zemack Contemporary Art Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel

2011 - Good help is hard to find, Zemack Contemporary Art Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel

2010 - Catwalk, Gallery 39, Tel Aviv, Israel; Minimal contradictions, TWIG Gallery, Brussels, Belgium

2009 - Don't worry, Julie M. Gallery, Toronto, Canada

2008 - Sabbath Match, Gallery 39, Tel Aviv, Israel

2007 - The Artist Who did not Look Back, Gallery 39, Tel Aviv

2003 - Domestic, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art

2002 - Julie M. Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel

2000 - Julie M. Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel

1997 - New Sculptures, Museum of Israeli Art

1995 - Pools, Artists House, Jerusalem, Israel

1990 - Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel

1989 - Selected 43, The Drawing Center, New York, U.S.

1987 - Givon Fine Arts Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel

Selected Group Exhibitions

2023 - Art Central HK, ZCH Gallery

2020 - Kunst Kiosk, Nicole Gnesa Gallery und Kusntberatung, Germany

2019 - Art Karlsruhe, Germany,

2017 - Street Art Volant - Torino, Italy

2017 - Art Miami, U.S. ZCH Gallery

2017 - Art Stage Singapore, ZCH Gallery

2016 - Zona Maco Contemporary Art, Mexico City, Mexico, Corridor Gallery

2015 - Art 15, London, Art Miami, Art Singapore, Art Central HK

2014 - START, Saatchi Gallery, London, U.K.

2013 - Pulse Art Fair Miami, U.S.

2012 - Pulse Art Fair NYC, U.S.; Shanghai Contemporary, China; Art Platform, Los Angeles, U.S.; Art Toronto, Canada; Art Miami, U.S.

2012 - We have a champion! Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv

2011 - Pulse Art Fair, LA, and Miami, ZCH Gallery

2010 - Art Brussels, with TWIG Gallery

2009 - Timebuoy, The Tel Aviv Biennial, Art TLV

2008 - Van Gogh in Tel Aviv, Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel

2005 - On the Banks of the Yarkon, Tel Aviv Museum of Art

2000 - The Vera, Silvia and Arturo Schwarz Collection, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel

1999 - Drawing: New Acquisitions,

The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel

1994 - Contemporary Art Meeting, Tel Hai 94, Israel

Israeli Sculpture 1948-1998, The Open Museum, Tefen, Israel

1984 - Noemi Givon Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel

Public Sculptures and Permanent Installations

A Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Three stone hearts, Jerusalem, Israel
Girl from Buda, Budapest, Hungary
You & Me, Metropolitan tower plaza, Warsaw, Poland
Two sides of the boulevard, Rothschild tower by Richard Meier, Tel Aviv, Israel
Mika, Maya, Zoe, Pedestrian mall, Rothschild St. Rishon LeZion
Mika and a cat, Tel Aviv, Israel
Family, Museum Tower Plaza, Tel Aviv, Israel
Aqueduct, Rothschild Boulevard, Tel Aviv, Israel
Goats, Wizo house, Tel Aviv, Israel
Penthouse, Tel Aviv Artists House, Israel
Arcade, Ashdod Park, Israel
Arch, Gan HaTzuk, Netanya, Israel
Bridge, The College of Management, Rishon LeZion
Pool, Gan Kineret, Kfar Saba, Israel
3 Goats, the Technion, Haifa, Israel
3 Goats, The President's House, Jerusalem, Israel

Grants and Scholarships

1989-90 Arts Matters, New York, U.S.

Public Collections

The British Museum, London, U.K.
Ludwig Museum, Aachen, Germany
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel
Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art
The Open Air Museum, Tefen, Israel
Ein Harod Museum, Israel

Selected Bibliography

Nuit Banai, Artforum International Magazine
Barbara A. MacAdam, ARTnews
Ronit Mathias - The Jerusalem post
NGA Barthels - Der Spiegel
Bildstrecke - Monopol Magazin
Jan Gardner - Boston Globe
Petra Gute - ARD.de
Hilbrand Rozema - NederlandsDagblad
Aviva Lori, Haaretz Magazine

Books

Sunny Side Up, Hirmer, 2011

A Muslim, a Christian and a Jew, Knocking on Heaven's Door, Hirmer, 2016