CLOSE DISTANCE | GROUP EXHIBITION

Close Distance considers collaboration not simply as a working method, but as a deliberate artistic position. Across the exhibition, collaboration becomes a site of reflection, negotiation, and exchange, shaped by the encounter between distinct artistic languages. Some projects result in a single joint work or installation, while others unfold as a dialogue between two separate works. Together, they reveal how artistic proximity can create the conditions for dialogue and exchange allowing new forms of translation and shared meaning to emerge.

In several projects, collaboration takes the form of material and spatial translation, as images, structures, and environments move from one medium into another.

Jessica Moritz and Simcha Even Chen explore the threshold between image and object through geometry, repetition, and spatial construction. Moritz’s new work engages movement and spatial perception through a painting, stretched on customized wood structure, reinterpreting Even Chen’s interest in structural distortion and the controlled collapse of porcelain.

A fragment of Adam Spiegel’s drone photograph is translated into Bianca Severijns’ layered paper relief. Spiegel’s aerial image transforms foam, water, and earth into abstract organic patterns, while Severijns returns this distant landscape to a tangible and physically proximate form through paper construction and repetition.

Suly Bornstein Wolff and Kfir Galatia Azulay examine architecture through divergent material practices and temporal registers. Wolff’s fragmentary wooden structures give renewed life to industrial materials, while Azulay’s marble models evoke the endurance of classical architecture. Their juxtaposition bridges material afterlife, permanence, and transformation.

Iris Fueredi and Adi T. Hoffman’s works emerge from mutual studio visits and shared observations of Tel Aviv construction sites. Exposed iron structures become a point of departure for works that address barrier, passage, vertical movement, and continuity through sculptural and material translation.

Other collaborations unfold through language, patterns, and systems of meaning, where signs, motifs, and visual structures are exchanged, displaced, and reassembled.

Anat Rozenson Ben-Hur and Maya Getzov’s collaboration begins with an exchange of patterns. Medical imagery of the optic nerve meets domestic and household motifs, creating a dialogue around closeness, difference, partnership, and alienation through each artist’s distinct material language.

Written symbols move between language and image in the works of Ann Ruth Factorovitz and Masha Orlovitz. Factorovitz’s folded glass carries handwritten script that bends and refracts with light, while Orlovitz’s layered monotype circles obscure etched marks, creating a space between revelation and concealment.

In another group of works, collaboration becomes an act of image, memory, and reconstruction, as personal, historical, and cultural images are fractured and reassembled.

Chen Chefetz and Alumah Fishman structure their collaboration through reciprocal image-making, with each artist reworking the other’s output through her own medium. The desert becomes a shared psychological and political landscape, gradually dissolving into an abstract terrain of visual and material erosion.

In Interwoven, Melani Hekimoglu and Elsa Ers Brosh revisit Jean-François Portaels’ The Jewish Woman from Tangiers from 1874. Drawing from their Turkish Jewish heritage, they reclaim the Orientalist image through ceramic tile and painting, examining identity, memory, and displacement through gesture, ornament, and reconstruction.

Avner Sher and Baptiste Leonne share an interest in time and the instability of memory. Leonne treats the image as a fragile mental space shaped by recollection and distortion, while Sher approaches the surface as an archaeological field marked by cuts, layers, and traces of history.

Ilana Portnoy and Tamar Branitzky revisit Matisse’s The Dance through painting and textile collage. Portnoy’s genderless “Luni” figures move across a reconstructed surface, where textile introduces softness, memory, and repair, forming a renewed image of human connection.

Finally, several works approach collaboration through the body, nature, and representation, examining how figures, animals, and landscapes are held between intimacy, distance, and mediation.

Noa Elfassi’s female figure, suspended between rest and dream, enters into dialogue with Igor Mikutski’s expressive abstract background. Painting, hand sewing, and machine sewing combine to create a layered work with depth, texture, and a strong material presence.

Tova Pesach approaches nature as a wild and immediate presence, with the animal embedded in its living terrain. Jennifer Bloch, by contrast, presents the animal as a mediated cultural image, exposed and held at a distance. Their dialogue unfolds between intimacy and representation.

Participating artists: Jessica Moritz, Simcha Even- Chen, Adam Spiegel, Bianca Severijns, Suly Bornstein Wolff, Kfir Galatia Azulay, Iris Fueredi, Adi T. Hoffman, Anat Rozenson Ben-Hur, Maya Getzov, Ann Ruth Factorovitz, Masha Orlovitz, Chen Chefetz, Alumah Fishman, Melani Hekimoglu, Elsa Ers Brosh, Avner Sher, Baptiste Leonne, Ilana Portnoy, Tamar Branitzky, Igor Mikutski, Noa Elfassi, Tova Pesach, Jennifer Bloch.

Text: Nathalie Wertheimer