Curator: Sari Golan
Assistant curator: Gili Zaidman
Ziva Jelin's first museum-scale solo exhibition features painting installations, video works, and large-scale paintings—among them paintings created before and after the terrible massacre in Kibbutz Be'eri and the Western Negev, which make their debut here. The exhibition focuses on trauma, memory, and recovery from the unique, personal perspective of an artist, who grapples with fundamental questions in her work: How do you paint a home? How do you depict memories? Can a painting of a childhood memory generate a new memory? How does the narrative of memory become a fictive or real story of identity and belonging? What is it in the regions of nostalgia that grips us, bringing us closer or distancing us? The works highlight her ability to weave different layers of a personal and collective experience into an artistic language that is both universal and local.
Over the years, Jelin has depicted the kibbutz where she was born, describing the paths, houses, and vegetation in detail and with spectacular virtuosity. In the studio, she works in the dark, projecting images onto canvas, and exploring the line between photography and painting, and the interrelations between what "has been" there and what was erased and forgotten, but bursts forth from beneath the surface. Jelin works simultaneously with photographs from the kibbutz archive and with contemporary photographs that she takes. She combines them and makes significant changes by means of powerful, vivid colors as well as drips and erasures, disintegration of the material and the deconstruction of the painterly image.
Curator: Ronit Eden
Assistant curators: Gili Zeidman, Tammy Trister
The image is taken from a conversation between Uri Katzenstein and Hatty Berg, chief curator of the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam.
Director of photography: Assaf Saban
Artists: Uri Katzenstein (1951–2018), Hadeel Abu Johar, Shay id Aloni, Nivi Alroy, Pinchas Cohen Gan, Hanna Freund-Chertok, Sharon Glazberg, Guy Goldstein, Hadi Kalil, Meital Katz-Minerbo, Sigalit Landau, Yossi Lederman, Uri Levinson, Efrat Natan, Karam Natour, Sasha Serber, Gil Shachar, Lior Shvil, Lior Tamim, Meir Tati
Uri Katzenstein’s work has defied conventions and pushed boundaries for over four decades. Throughout his career he expanded the range of his abilities – both physical and mental – while exploring personal and societal traumas, creating works that respond to complex realities with a mixture of pain and humor.
His great curiosity pushed him to experiment and cooperate with artists in various mediums, including music, sculpture, video, installations, and performances, participating in them, influencing, and being influenced.
Group Exhibition with Uri Katzenstein examines the significance of the emotional, cultural, and artistic legacy that Katzenstein left after his death, through the lens of his artistic relationships with other artists. Some were his students, some collaborated with him, and others were active before him or alongside him. In different chapters of the exhibition, connections are created that offer a dialogue between content and meanings.
In Group Exhibition with Uri Katzenstein, works he created in the 1970s will be displayed for the first time, revealing a library of images that he began compiling early in his career. Alongside these will be presented works he created for his final exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam, in 2018. Katzenstein's works are the central axis to which the works of the participating artists relate. They deal with traumas, personal identity and communal belonging, what has happened in the past and what the future holds, invented rituals, and how much the body can endure.
Ran Tenenbaum & Artworks from the Zetlin Collection
Curator: Dina Yakerson
Artists: Ran Tenenbaum \Leon Bakst / Alexandre Iacovleff / Philip Melyavin / Leonid Pasternak / Valentin Sarov / Diego Rivera / Hugo Weisman
At the center of the exhibition is the prevalent artistic genre that engages with a human figure. The genre of portraiture has undergone many incarnations in the history of visual arts in Western and Eastern Europe. The exhibition’s title is borrowed from the terms coined by the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung. These terms describe two aspects of the psyche: persona – the representative self with which a person identifies, and the shadow – the repressed and hidden part of human consciousness.
Following Jung's concepts, the current exhibition is divided into two parts: the larger one is dedicated to works by the contemporary artist Ran Tenenbaum, who painted countless portraits of himself and those close to him. The portraits were made by observing live models: his family, his friends, his students, and himself. These are very personal and revealing paintings, born from the intimate connection forged between the painter and the painted subject.
The second part presents works from the collection of Mikhail and Maria Zetlin, a pair of collectors who emigrated from Russia to Paris and the United States. This collection was donated to the city of Ramat Gan in 1959. These are personal works, which depict the members of the collectors' family, and provide an intimate glimpse into their lives.
The encounter between the two parts of the exhibition proposes a fresh perspective on the theme of the portrait by connecting different periods, distant regions, and varied cultures. The works invite the viewers to gaze directly and immerse themselves in the faces of the others — to look at the mysterious nucleus of human experience, depicted in bold brush strokes or delicate pencil lines.
Curator: Sari Golan
Assistant curator: Gili Zaidman
Adva Drori's first solo museum exhibition is an immersive installation, inviting the viewer to a multi-layered sensory journey. Memory, trauma, and healing combine in a work that intertwines personal intimacy with collective space. The Hebrew word for sorrow (etsev) in the exhibition's title also denotes a nerve in the physiological sense. In his book The Body Keeps the Score, psychiatrist and researcher Bessel van der Kolk demonstrates how imaging techniques such as MRI can be used to identify the effects of trauma on the brain's nerves, providing insight into the processes of neural and emotional healing.
Drori draws inspiration from the concept of holding, introduced by psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott, referring to the physical and emotional support that a mother offers her infant. In the installation, the act of holding is embodied not only in the interaction with the materials, but also in the collective presence: the audience itself becomes an integral part of the work, inviting a public-social gaze into its private space. Drori creates a new kind of space, one that seeks to establish an "emotional holding" of the viewer, emphasizing the ability to support the other, particularly in situations of distress, pain, or insecurity. It is a safe setting for fundamental emotions that range from pleasure to threat, from devotion to lack of control.
A new exhibition cluster at Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art
What the Heart Desires: Art as a Gateway to Healing
The exhibition cluster "What the Heart Desires" engages with Israeli society and art in the context of healing and recovery. It touches on painful junctions in our life here, such as collective traumas, social ailments, and personal wounds, looking at how art offers tools for coping, healing, and mending.
The exhibitions in this cluster invite viewers to look inward and outward, prompting them to ask: What are we looking for in art: comfort, strength, inspiration, perhaps a sense of belonging? Through a diverse and stratified selection of Israeli art, the current exhibitions strive to introduce a new space for coping, growth, and hope.
