I met with three Israeli artists of very different backgrounds and experiences whose art gave me the feeling of summer escapism, who agreed to answer my three questions:
By BASIA MONKAUpdated: AUGUST 31, 2024 21:42 Niv Tishbi(photo credit: DANIEL HANOCH)
As the curtain falls on this month, we look back on the heat of an Israeli August – felt in both weather and the ongoing war.
In August, many Israelis look for ways to maintain their mental health through sports, music, social activities, and art. “Escapism” seems to be the term that I have heard frequently this summer.
So this time, in my search for interesting art exhibitions, I decided to look for art that takes the viewers to a different place and lets us dissociate from the surrounding reality on some level, at least for a moment. Even if it was not the initial aim of the artists, the outcome of their work can render this escapist effect.
I met with three Israeli artists of very different backgrounds and experiences whose art gave me that feeling, who agreed to answer my three questions:
What inspires you?
What do you call art?
What, in your opinion, makes your artwork different from that of other artists?
Combining his academic skills with a fascination for 3D space in creating sculptures and installations, Tishbi has presented several solo shows in Israel and has participated in many group exhibitions in Israel and Germany.
He is the recipient of the Yossi Stern Prize (2012) and the Israel Museum Ben-Yitzhak Honorable Mention Award for an illustrated children’s book (2018), plus several grants, including from the Mifal Hapayis Council for Culture and the Arts (2021, 2018) and the Yehoshua Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts (2023).
Tishbi’s works often recall children’s toys, like those in last year’s solo exhibition “The Carnival” at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art. While dealing with existential matters, they are also influenced by cartoon figures; accordingly, Tishbi explains that he chose to go with pink, one of his favorite colors, as a cartoonish, unrealistic version of human skin color.
The Tel Aviv-based Tishbi plays with what appears on the surface to be light content, giving the viewers joyful and fun sensations at first, to engage them later in finding underneath layers of his work. “I try to immerse experiences that challenge conventional perspectives.” In his works, he explores questions of freedom and liberation (mental, personal, social, and political, but “not in the context of what we hear on the news,” as he noted in the interview); and he contrasts these with mechanisms of organization and order, control, and sometimes oppression.
Also in his current work, the installation Sunbathing, the first site-specific work commissioned for Nata’s Garden urban plaza at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tishbi deals with the issue of freedom, but in a summer, outwardly relaxed form. The artist invites visitors to walk and chill out among tables, parasols, and pink, red, and black (various stages of sunbathing) sunbeds merged with human bodies.
“I am happy to see that people enjoy it, but I want them to participate and think deeper,” he says.
The faces/beds have eyes but no facial expressions; Tishbi leaves us with a mystery of their thoughts and feelings, and with questions of why – as Tishbi points out to me – they can’t move from their chairs....
Inspiration: “In the broadest sense, I’m influenced by my environment. I often draw inspiration from things that scare or disturb me. These elements drive me, demanding my attention and allowing me to grapple with them through my art. In many of my projects, despite their vibrant colors and playful spirit, there is often a dystopian undertone. I find inspiration in the grotesque, the absurd, and the humorous.
“The aesthetics through which I interpret the world are based on geometric shapes. These are engineered forms, bent into molds, unnatural, and, in a sense, primitive. My use of geometry is also allegorical, representing the tension between order and chaos, control and freedom. Occasionally, I draw inspiration from African masks and totems, which further imbue my work with a pagan and ritualistic aspect.”
Meaning of art: “For me, art is a mode of expression and a way of engaging with the world, reflecting ideas, emotions, and thoughts. With its elusive and mysterious allure, art can resonate with philosophical concepts, amplifying their significance so they can be felt more deeply.
“What I find most beautiful about art is that it allows the observers to reflect on themselves and draw out what they need most from the work. I love how art can illuminate dormant thoughts that might otherwise remain unnoticed, and this is something I constantly strive to achieve in my work.”
Tishbi’s art: “My background in design has shaped a multidisciplinary approach and profoundly influenced my perspective, by a blend of two-dimensionality and materiality. Symbolically using material flatness, my sculptures, though inherently three-dimensional, emphasize and challenge the two-dimensional medium. This experimental process of flattening reflects a kind of conquest, a formal unification that erases individuality and prompts contemplation on the fluidity of identity.
“Transforming my imagery into textured, multidimensional experiences, I aim to create work that actively engages the audience.”
Asad Azi was born in 1955 in Shfaram in the Galilee. He studied art at the University of Haifa and Tel Aviv University, and continued his studies in Carrara, Italy.
An accomplished artist – trained initially as a sculptor but known for his paintings – Azi is a university fine arts teacher. He is the recipient of many prizes, such as the Yad Layaad Prize awarded by the president of Israel (1987); the Beatrice Kolliner Prize for a Young Israeli Artist, Israel Museum, Jerusalem (1990); and the Prize of the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport (2000). He has exhibited in solo and group shows in Israel, Europe, South Africa, and the US. He lives and works in Jaffa.
In his recent exhibition “Terra Infirma” at Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv, Azi tells the story of the Messiah viewed from different religious perspectives. His paintings in the exhibition are erotic, mystical, and intellectual at the same time. He also challenges the gender of the Messiah, saying it might be a woman. Azi also creates collages by adding non-obvious elements to his acrylic paintings; for example, a crouched serviette, in a painting where Azi (not for the first time in his work) quotes American abstract painter Mark Rothko.
In the context of the Messiah, he paints donkeys. “I paint from imagination,” he says. Yet he admits that the images might be reminiscent of his childhood memories: “I grew up in an agricultural village, where I saw many donkeys.”
Azi, the oldest of five boys, was raised by his mother. He recalls: “She sent me to a Jewish school in Kiryat Ata, eight kilometers from home, because she needed someone to read documents in Hebrew after my father was killed by Syrians in 1961. My father served in the Israeli army.”
Azi was the only non-Jewish student in the class. His school friendships have lasted until today. Between high school and university, he served three years in the IDF. Later on, he was one of the founders of the Rega group of artists.
In 1982 he was involved in the strike by the Golan Heights Druze population against forced imposition of Israeli citizenship. He was one of the organizers of the first festival of The Center for the Palestinian Heritage, in Taiba. In 1986 he represented Israel at the Venice Biennale. Azi is fluent in Arabic and Hebrew. When I ask him about his identity, he replies, “I am an artist.”
Inspiration: “What inspires me is the habit I’ve gotten used to for about 50 years to get up in the morning to go to the studio and paint something that I think about all the time, a kind of situation, some topic that concerns me that is related to life here, in the place where I live, that is related to an idea that I’m thinking about. This is also a metaphor for the existential situation in general. Questions of existence concern me.
“It is also understood that my knowledge of art history guides me and spurs me on to be one of the family members of the great artists that I grew up with. [I am inspired by] the literature [i.e., heritage] they left behind, as well as the recent debuts [of current artists] in galleries and museums.”
Meaning of art: “It is difficult for me to define what art is. There are philosophical definitions of why an object is art and why another is not. This is less interesting to me. I attach to visual art a certain type of stage or window through which I can express my art, something that has no use but has an aesthetic and spiritual role.”
Azi’s art: “What I do is a certain type of realization of an idea into a material, using the technique or techniques that seem most suitable to me. In my case, it’s painting. I try to make the image complex and interesting in a certain way that makes it worth a look or the effort on the part of the viewer to figure out what he is looking at. Some very abstract things exist inside me (feelings, sensations, thoughts, or imaginations) and [they] come into being, while I make another layer and another layer [of paint].”
Vanda Keren was born in Libya, and shortly afterward her family moved to Rome. When Keren was three, her parents decided to join their relatives in Israel, and the family made aliyah. She grew up speaking Italian and Hebrew, in central Israel in Pardesiya and Bat Yam. For many years she has been based in Tel Aviv.
Her way to fine art has been unorthodox; it started with her hairdressing career. She is an international award-winning hair stylist, recognized for her innovative coif sculpting. (“I brought L’Oreal to Israel,” she tells the Magazine.) After decades of success in that field, she decided to express her creativity in art. “I have been creative since age 16, but only as an adult I took classes from the best Israeli artists, and in the last 25 years I have been pursuing my art career.”
In art, Keren began as a sculptor in concrete and bronze. Her interest in human bodies and faces seems to be a natural extension of her hair designs. She mixes realism with abstraction.
Soon after the sculptures, Keren started to paint (mostly with oil, sometimes with acrylic, and occasionally a mix of both), expressing her other fascination for intensive colors.
In multidimensional paintings, she reflects on her nature observations from various trips worldwide, and her inner world and spirituality. In Keren’s exhibition “Over the Rainbow,” just opened at the Tel Aviv Artists’ House, she shares her passion for nature and life.
Inspiration: “It all started with the hairdressing profession, and then I discovered that it was an artistic field. I became a color expert, a so-called colorist in the field of hair. I learned for five years to attain the appropriate colors in the hair field, and I brought them to my art.
“All my life I have dreamed of sculpting, painting, and creating. I started only after my divorce. I am inspired by my travels around the world, and places in nature that move me are my main sources of inspiration. I love waterfalls and the sea, and I am influenced by them. In art, I also am inspired by primitivism, classicism, and surrealism.”
Meaning of art: “Art leads me in life. From making dinner for my family to visiting museums and galleries all over the world, art guides my life. As the aesthetic side is very dominant in my personality, aesthetics is an art for me.”
Keren’s art: “For me, a woman is like a canvas. This is how I create my paintings. An empty canvas, and I pour my imagination on it. Every person is unique and special and brings his or her art out, the biography, and the feelings. My colorism bursts without limits, and I learn from the environment that this burst of color is unconditional and very unique to me and my personality.
“Spirituality is always [present] in my work, and it is important to me to move the viewer.”
