Hadar Gad

Hadar Gad

Hadar Gad is an Israeli Artist. Recipient of The Ministry of Culture Award 2016.
Born in 1960 in Kibbutz Ein-Harod, Her paintings are composed of various landscapes and sceneries, depicting the different views that have accompanied her throughout her life.
From the hills surrounding The Valley of Israel, to the semi-uprooted orchards by where she calls home, Gad presents us, through her precise and detailed paintings, the hidden truth of her observation, by transcribing light and color in her unique and personal way. Her realistic paintings are close-ups of sights that make up our lives in their silence.
Beyond the desire for a faithful representation, Gad’s works turn and gaze downward, for the most part, towards the earth. It deepens through the material itself – in which light is trapped, that some will say souls are trapped, she wraps her paintings in a thin membrane, perhaps clouded, perhaps dusty, each moment breaking it up further.
The paintings are built using many transparent layers, repeatedly painting and then scraping it off. The result is a surface that, while maintaining its seemingly realistic appearance, doesn’t disclose all of its secrets at once. The attention is constantly shifting between the objects and the spaces between them; inward and outward movements, looking at the landscape while looking through it.
Breaking through realism, Gad’s sketches become maps, labyrinths, of that other realm. The further one regards Gad’s paintings, the more evident it becomes that they are not simply born on their own, as they reverberate with the reminder that life is enclosed in it, that in days long past, history happened here, a vanishing tradition, stories left untold.
Gad’s work can be found in public and private collections in Israel, the United States, Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Finland, Italy, France and Sweden. Numerous key galleries and museums such as The Jewish Museum New York have featured Hadar Gad’s work in the past.