Gallery Omer Tirosh is proud to present the beautiful silence , the exhibition of the artist Yael Barlev. The exhibition, curated by Hagar Brill, consists of a number of workspaces, created and adapted especially for the gallery space, which are spread out in front of the viewer as they move between the various rooms.

In one room we seem to enter a stalactite cave, with amorphous bodies surrounding us from all sides. We are required to walk cautiously between the objects that resemble delicate pupae, but soon it turns out that there are no butterflies that will burst from them. Barlev's works are deceptive and activate the viewer in an attempt to decipher their double meaning. On the one hand, Airy on the crisp, transparent, fragile-looking sheet of paper. On the other hand, the images are revealed to us: monstrous animals, like wolves with sharp teeth, faceless girls in short dresses, shaky houses flying like a kite on a string or cobwebs that seem to have emerged from a terrifying nightmare. The delicate embroidery and sketching are in complete contrast to the horrifying scenes created by Barlev, and it seems that rather than softening the feelings of fear and deterrent, the more laborious and measured work adds another layer of violent silencing as a cover designed to conceal the horror.

In another room we encounter a terrifying collection of children's puppets, who underwent various processes of aggressive distortions: one grew eight legs like a spider or an octopus; another was made of erect hairs made of iron wire; another doll appeared as a red and coarse stitch Covering her entire stomach like a huge scar, while red threads burst from her eyes like blood. The use of dolls can not help but remind us of Freud's essay on the Alibi - the abstract concept that describes the sense of horror, anxiety and strangeness that strikes us in the face of familiar places, objects or images that suddenly lose their known characteristics and become threatening. The ability to awaken in us the sense of alpine as inherent in the dolls in the first place, for their form is like a living human being, but they themselves are devoid of life. This effect is exacerbated by Barlev's dolls, whose stunts give us an almost physical reaction when we imagine the human body that could have passed the mask of torture. Here, too, we find the ambivalence characteristic of Barlev, who treats all these injuries through an innocent-looking object like a children's doll.

The familiar images of Barlev come back again, almost obsessively, in a series of additional works of transparent containers. Within the same rough boxes are multilayered drawings made in red threads on transparent paper. The different layers of image converge in front of the boxes, and again discover the same predatory animals that chase the child, close around her, or attack an empty children's stroller. The chaos that takes place in the transparent frames, as if it presents itself, but also remains out of reach.

The recurring motifs in the works are drawn from Barlev's private world, and are taken from family pictures and embroidery that accompanied her childhood. But the story that emerges in her works is not only her personal story, and the scenes she chooses to present are instantly and universally read, evoking thoughts about delusional childhood memories, collective fears and dark secrets that remain silent.



Yael Barlev lives and works in Carmiel. Graduate of Art Studies, Western Galilee College and Continuing Art Studies Program, Oranim College. She is a multidisciplinary artist and in recent years has been dealing mainly with issues of gender and identity through personal memories. (2011), at the Yigal Alon Gallery in Ginosar (2011), at the Petach Tikva Museum (2008), as well as in solo exhibitions at the end gallery in Nahariya (2013) and at the Kibbutz Mahanayim gallery 2011).

מזל מאזניים 2, פינת כיכר קדומים 8- יפו העתיקה טלפון הגלריה 077-5545773