- Dror by Yael Goren Strauss/Image courtesy of Zadik Gallery
Life Cycles, an exhibit of works by Yael Goren Strauss, will open at the Zadik Gallery on Thursday, March 3, 2011. The opening reception will begin at 20:00.
From the gallery’s description of the artist’s work:
Yael Goren Strauss’ exhibition might be called acoustic. Her homecoming to Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak, after twenty years in the city, makes her look at the place where she was born in Canaanite terms of land, air and scenery. The first stages of her re-absorption connect her longingly to the familiar, arid, non-imposing landscape to overcome the time and lifestyle gap. The local ambassadors – plain, low, deprived wild plants struggle to grow off the meager yellow soil. Goren-Strauss pulls them out of the ground and brings them to her studio whole with their roots. The naked roots, unaccustomed to the light, receive the full attention they deserve as that powerful concealed element supporting all that’s beautifully exposed. The desire to bring the plants to the studio derives from Goren-Strauss’s search for quiet to cleanse the visual stress of the fields. Artistically a realist artist, she is determined to abandon the fashionable spectacle – adulating multi-layered images, and create out of loyalty to the ascetic. The images, exposed on paper or canvas are basic, focused, quiet and delicate lacking background, like an acoustic song. Goren-Strauss feels affinity to common, simple elements of Israeli nature such as the snail and sparrow. The snail, often seen en-mass or the sparrow familiar in its singing, gain symbolic significance when displayed isolated on the page. Goren-Strauss chooses to draw with pencil, shellac and pigments – frugal materials (unlike aristocratic oil) just like her images. Shellac enables Goren-Strauss to immortalize the yellowish landscape as well as the nostalgia engulfing her as she tunes the sound’s pitch.
Zadik – Art Within Reach, 16 Shimon HaZadik Street, Jaffa, 077-495-6981
