Walking on Dry Land: Rotem Reshef’s Solo Exhibition, New York

Offering a haven from the bustling city, Rotem Reshef’s painterly environment is created by two islands of color and texture.

While suggesting a site of refuge, the site-specific installation presents a dual perspective of an inner world mirroring an exterior landscape, arresting in time the cycle of seasons. Reshef’s practice proves that painting can shift modes, expand and modify our perception, like a story unfolding.

Reshef’s work alludes to a long history of drifting and wandering both of her own, her families, and all of us who navigate a world of shifting restrictions, the closing and opening of borders and global migration. The movement through the space may allude to the crossing of the red sea, as the dry land offered a fantastical path of rescue and safety, a sudden and unexpected change of events that transformed a catastrophe into a trail for redemption.

Strolling the urban environments like Walter Benjamin’s Flâneur, Reshef picks up traces of abandoned history, signs of lives that existed and vanished - vegetation waste, twigs and scraps of wood, remains of a landscape, either planned or wild, that are gathered once again, into the immortalizing world of artmaking. Bringing into the studio these anonymous materials, overlooked and thrown out of the city’s cycle of consumerism, Reshef is offering the idea of Tikkun, healing the existing wounds of life, giving them an additional chance to gain appreciation and beauty.

Curator: Udi Urman