Israeli group exhibiting artists
in co-operation with Collezionista di arte a Roma
February,03 – February 13, 2023
Luigi Bellini Museo Firenze, Italy
Curators: Liza Bardugo/Israel, Dr. Gabriele Giuliani/Italy

Israeli Group exhibition is a collective exhibition organized by the Galleria Il Collezionista in collaboration with I.C.U. Cultural Union. The Curators of the event DR. LIZA BARDUGO and DR. GABRIELE GIULIANI welcome the public at the Luigi Bellini Museum in Florence from 3 to 13 February 2023. With great and renewed pleasure this event aims to show the possible dialogue and comparison between the various creativity of the artists present in the exhibition, in a tribute to the city of Israel and its inhabitants. Indeed, within the exhibition spaces it is possible to admire a plurality of different languages.

ADELE JERUSALMY is an artist who uses the portrait as if it were a tribute to the ancient masters of the early Italian Renaissance, managing to capture through the pose and the color a sort of ancient gaze, colored by the soft fabrics and drapery that envelop the female body in a soft embrace. Here the colors dialogue with the subject represented, however caught in a moment of personal solitude and with a strongly introspective flavor.

AYALA BORTEN instead focuses her research on the use of pure color which is spread on the canvas through strong chromatic fields, capable of giving body and volume in a crescendo of exuberant, fast movements, which referring to certain almost primordial representations made of ancient rock paintings. In her canvases the artist wants to strike the viewer with the lively movement generated by the vibrant use of bright colors, which create shapes and profiles that are not better defined but in any case full of rich and vibrant creative energy.

The language crumbles in the works of DANIEL LEVY who shows a decomposed landscape, fragmented in an iridescent universe of colors that disintegrate in space and create a new vision; a vision that forces the viewer to observe from multiple points of view and which in their diversity return a multifaceted vision where color creates movement and it is the absolute protagonist of the work. A dense color which combined with the strong sense of dynamic movement returns a new, different image, albeit always inspired by the reality that surrounds us.

DORIT MENDELSON is instead an artist who works on the visual decomposition of the image, almost wanting to give back to the observer the obsessive reproduction of the advertising media language. It seems to be faced with a publicity stunt, where the subject is replicated in its modernity of colors and lines that become increasingly graphic, sparse and essential, as if to remind us that in our modern world everything is consumed rapidly, frenetically and without that there is time to fix an image, a sign in time.

In the works of EPHRAT GOLDBERG a double vision is perceived linked both to the subject represented and to the landscape, in fact the artist places in the foreground a figure that seems to be absorbed in his personal and subjective thought, while in the background a distant and undefined city appears , perhaps a village, where the colors and lines create a jolt of thoughts and visual plans that generate confusion in the viewer, lost in front of an internalized vision of the places and which is accentuated even more by the use of strong and decisive colour.

From the landscape we pass to the private and subjective dimension with the work of ELI SERFATY. The painting captures a lyrical and subjective dimension that refers to the personal world of private affections, where every glance, every crossing of faces and gestures seems cadenced, weighted to return an introspective vision that color helps to increase. The faces are silent, united by an apparent dialogue which nevertheless remains silent in front of the interplay of glances that the two protagonists exchange against the background of an indefinite reality which can be a city, a landscape or something else. The dialogue is all concentrated in their intense gazes.

Different is the painting of EWA ELIRAN which tunes all its pictorial energy on the young subject represented. In fact, the psychological aspect of the character is brought to the fore who observes us with his large eyes, and that red thread in his hands seems to be the omen of something that is about to give way, to break and to arouse concern in the observers. It seems that the artist necessarily wants to start a reflection, a debate, and he does so in the clearest and most direct way possible, without decorative accessories.

EYAL TEVET analyzes the affective and childhood dimension through a private language; he does it through the oneiric world of the dream, in which the subject is represented in the moment of his unconscious, when he is isolated from the world and immersed in his inner world. The artist uses color with great skill and through a full and immersive technique he seems to give the draft fully on the surface.

JACOB LEVY works with sculptural masses and returns a three-dimensional image full of effects related to color, plastic masses, the third dimension which returns a body modeled by the shapes that outline its features. The body is modulated through the use of decorations that enrich the figure in space in a total way.

The artist JENNY KIEN shows current society in his work in a dialogue through the individual who is always immersed in the social world but still remains alone, isolated in a world that technology has distorted and made increasingly anonymous. The masses of color restore the bodies and shapes of the protagonists of the work, each immersed in his own self, each alone, isolated from his social context. Only color returns that alternation of masses and volumes in a three-dimensional way. LIORA SHACHAM places the landscape at the center of her work and shows a strong, luxuriant nature, full of lush vegetation that seems to envelop the viewer. The color helps to create a surreal landscape, which takes you back to a tropical forest where vegetation is the undisputed protagonist. The shades of green and blue are rendered with great skill to create a kind of living paradise, where we can imagine the most varied animal and plant species inhabiting that dense forest that characterizes an ever new and different vegetation.

The female body is the protagonist in the work of NOFAR TSUK, an artist who puts the female universe and its nuances in the foreground through a skilful play of warm and cold colors, combined in a full way so as to create a three-dimensional effect but at the same time they create an inner dialogue made of emotions, silences, small hints of a private and personal world capable of transporting the viewer into an inner world built on the affections, on the personal sensitivity of the woman and of the female universe in general.

The body is once again the protagonist in the work of PNINA NEDIVI who in her sculpture places the female body in the foreground, transformed in the manner of an ancient divinity. A body sculpted and modeled in the softness of its features, where the forms take on a new meaning and the wings seem to be the completion of an ancient divinity. The wings, the body, the material make the whole bust appear solemn and ancient, as befits the divinities of an ancient and distant yet always current past.

SARIT MAYER works with the language of advertising by taking common people as inspirational models, strongly typified and with a local identity, which is contrasted with the symbols of the capitalized West. Here we witness an ambivalence between the identitarian inhabitants of a reality and the common sense of globalization that marketing has imposed on the market. The protagonists are depicted with a strong sense of color that shapes the canvas through plays of light and shadow, full chromatisms, alternations of strong, characterizing lights and shadows.

TSAPHIE ZOCHAR STENDEL uses color in an almost fluorescent way, giving life to a sort of fantastic, unusual vegetation, which resembles nothing already seen except something that belongs only to the world of fantasy, memory and the unconscious. The colors seem dictated by the desire to amaze the viewer through a contrast between cold and warm colors, full and empty games. The entire reproduced surface takes on fantastic tones, almost from other worlds than the earthly one and the whole composition has a surreal and magical charm.

YEDIDYA ISH SHALOM recovers the ancient tradition linked to the portrait and puts the gaze of the represented

the foreground through the strong demarcation of the gaze that penetrates the feelings of the spectator, investigates his conscience and seems to interrogate his interlocutor with a silent dialogue. The expressive power is given by the black color that envelops everything. The tones are dark, enveloping and create a mysterious surface which serves to give total importance to the subject represented, always putting the introspective dimension in the foreground.

The anthropic universe becomes the focal point of YAEL MOR's research where we can see within the composition multiple perspective planes rendered through different perspectives and structural planes, where color becomes the protagonist together with the whole composition which through the volumes returns a 'new image, but with strong typifications that give the sense of an ancient amalgam, where everything has had its shape and origin and which regenerates everything. They are alternations of worlds and intimate sensations that the artist places at the center of his visual composition and the color always makes it strong, with a great visual impact on the viewer.

DRssa ELENA GRADINI, italian art critic

ADELE JERUSALMY

EFRAT GOLDBERG

AYALA BORTEN

DANIEL LEVYI

DORIT MENDELSON

ELI SERFATY

EWA ELIRAN

EYAL TEVET

JACOB LEVY

JENNY KIEN

LIORA SHACHAM

NOFAR TSUK

PNINA NEDIVI

SARIT MAYER

TSAPHIE ZOHAR STENDAL

YAEL MOR

YEDIDIA ISH SHALOM