The new exhibition features three bodies of work recently created by three artists. Formal, conceptual, tonal and other connections can be drawn between the works.

Yaron Attar's body of work is comprised of oil paintings on Formica and wood panels, as well as two objects that are displayed next to the paintings. The title "Armor" can be interpreted both as a protective shield and as an element of armament and offense. Similarly, the works play a double game of vulnerability and scathe.

The work titled "Armed" feature a red stretched out arm. It describes the armed potential of the hand gesture, while the brushwork exposes the inner anatomy of the organ through opaque puddles of paint. Like other works in the show, it materially expresses the duality of "Armor". The Formica panels refuse to absorb the images depicted on them, while creating the impression that the diluted paint is constantly changing and decomposing.

This is the second display of Fahed Halabi's works in RawArt gallery, preceded by his 2016 solo show "One More Round." The current show includes 4 works out of a series that the artist is developing in the past year – paintings that are based on common contemporary media images of refugees. Halabi recognizes the recurring patterns that underline these images, revolving around universal categories such as motherhood, journey, and foreignness. His paintings reconstruct the process that turns humans into anonymous, faceless characters that lack a specific identity.

Through emulating techniques of wall painting and graffiti, Halabi aims towards borrowing the temporariness of these techniques, which create images that are imprinted but can easily vanish or get erased. Halabi imports these so-called low culture painting techniques into the traditional oil on canvas, thus emphasizing the differences between a sense of locality or belonging, to that of displacement and struggle.      

Dror Daum's body of work "The Wonderous World" is titled after a series of children card albums by the same name, which was widespread in Israel in the late 1970s and 1980s. The cards featured utopian and flat depictions of the world through 3 main categories: animals, iconic landscapes, and human technological achievements – a division that Daum's work returns to at a distance of time.

3 of the 4 works feature a closed relationship between two elements that were introduced inside the control environment of the artist's studio – a shark and a beer cap, a dog and bag of water inside an aquarium, a reflection of a human figure and a bat mark. The 4th work portrays technology as the bearer of a message, which is also the first indication of doom. Daum's artistic strategies shed light on the gap that exists between a pre-internet childhood perception of the world, manifested in the images of the card albums, and the more complex, reserved and threatened perception of a contemporary adult subject.

Text: Maya Bamberger

Yaron Attar was born in Israel in 1979, and he lives and works in Tel Aviv. He holds a degree in advanced art studies from Hamidrasha Art School, Beit Berl and a BFA from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. Attar has had solo exhibition at venues such as Hezi Cohen Gallery and The Kibbutz Art Gallery in Tel-Aviv, and at Cabri Gallery. Attar's works has been included in various group exhibitions in venues such as The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Kunstwerk Carlshütte, Germany, The First Tel-Aviv Art Biennial, the Herzelia Museum of Art, the Genia Schreiber Tel-Aviv University Art Gallery, Subvision Kunst Festival, Hamburg, MoBY (Museums of Bat Yam), Tampere Film Festival, Finland, and Kunsthale Faust, Hannover.

Fahed Halabi was born in 1970 in Majdal-Shams, and currently, lives and works in Hamburg. Halabi graduated from the Fine Art program at Tel-Hai College in 1998, and in 2006 he completed his B. Ed from HaMidrasha School of Art, Beit Berl. Halabi has had solo exhibitions at Bilbao Art Gallery Center in Spain, Mayer Gallery in Hamburg, Rivoli 59 Gallery in Paris, Fateh Modarris Art Center in Majdal Shams, and at RawArt Gallery and HaMidrasha Gallery in Tel Aviv. His work has also been exhibited in various group exhibitions worldwide, in venues such as Herzliya Museum of Art, MoBY (Museums of Bat Yam), The University Gallery Umea in Sweden, Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, Mémoire de l’avenir gallery in Paris and the Beit Hageffen Gallery in Haifa.

Dror Daum was born in 1970 in Jaffa, and he lives and works in Tel Aviv. Daum holds a BFA and an MFA from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. He has held solo exhibitions at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, etc. gallery in Prague, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, and Alon Segev Gallery, Tel Aviv, among other venues. His work has been exhibited in various group exhibitions worldwide in venues such as the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Kuandu Museum of Fine Art in Taipei, the Venice Architecture Biennale, Pratt Institute in New York, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Petah Tikva Museum of Art, and MoBY (Museums of Bat Yam).

A review on the show, Uzi Tzur, Haaretz, 9.11.17 (Heb)