The duo exhibition "Daughter of iris, Son of a hole" brings together works by Yael Wertheim Soen and Tamar Sharara. Both bodies of work are preoccupied with volume and flatness and flow between the mediums of painting, sculpture, drawing and photography.

 

Wertheim Soen's works are monochromatic, dense and full of figures and events; she describes them as a response to Sharara's minimalist and colorful objects. For example, the large painting” All Hours (Guys and Dolls)” (oil on paper, 215x273 cm, 2025), was created as a response to Sharara's floor sculpture placed at the entrance to the space (Flag, plywood and papier-mâché, 273x185x35 cm, 2013): a red platform with a kind of bowling balls painted in pastel colors. Sharara pierced the balls so that the three black circles pointing upwards seem to produce three portraits. The painting addresses the questions that Wertheim Soen posed to Sharara's floor work, among them: What is a face? What is human and what is done for the human? What does violence look like? What does violence look like in art? Are only humans violent or bearers of violence, or can objects also make unbearable, intrusive, offensive movements?

 

Sharara's objects in the exhibition are direct and yet enigmatic: a sphere that is also a face, a hole that is both an eye and a nose, a three-dimensional composition that is a flag  (its mixed and faded colors are reminiscent of the colors of the Palestinian flag). The work “Flag (Foot)” (plywood, 360x70x9 cm, 2025) is reminiscent of the greater Israel. These floor sculptures can be seen as a local interpretation of Jasper Johns's Flag work. The sculptures are placed in space as an obstacle to the gaze, as barriers that direct walking through the space and do not allow for a close look at the paintings. They invite a look from above, like the exploratory movement of children who come across an anthill; like someone who has to be careful with their steps so as not to trip.

 

The colorfulness of Sharara's sculptures creates a tension between the absoluteness of the primary colors of her works and the monochromaticity of the diluted color of Wertheim Soen's paintings. For Wertheim Soen, monochrome is a means of formulating an unfinished state, of leaving the painting in the stage of the lower layer. For Sharara, the nude sculptures and the sculpture of the foot, which seems to be a preparation for casting, also formulate An intermediate state. This is a state that allows artists to paint and sculpt with intensity and precision, but to constantly face a new beginning – in the face of what has not yet been painted and not yet sculpted; what has not yet been done. Wertheim Soen’s works are neither paintings nor sculptures, but a promise of something that can happen. So are Sharara’s sculptures; they are processual and linger on the act of creating the image.

 

There is something puppet-like in the sculpted and painted images of the two artists, which creates ambivalent feelings of longing and rejection. The dismantling and reassembly of the images are terrifying, monstrous, and at the same time delightful. The works are a disorder that hides within itself a “hole” – an opening to the unknown, in a bubble that occurs beneath the surface and is hidden from the eye’s gaze.