The exhibition Back to Back is an installation composed of multiple components that relate both to the gallery space and to the view reflected from outside: the large buildings of Kiryat HaMelacha, covered in graffiti, as seen through the gallery window. Gur Inbar, a ceramic artist who produces vessels and other ceramic forms in a range of sizes, paints his works with a free, uninhibited, highly colorful and vibrant hand. This painterly approach is extended onto the gallery walls in a way that echoes the graffiti across the street, “drawing” it into the interior space and creating a complete dialogue between outside and inside.
The wall paintings, landscape-like in character and varying in intensity, function as a flat backdrop for a group of wall sculptures—large-scale reliefs that simulate human figures larger than life. These works draw inspiration from Greek caryatids: sculpted female figures that bear and support architectural structures. Inbar’s caryatids are a contemporary, liberated version that references the ancient image while infusing it with present-day content—expressive, colorful painterliness that resonates with international contemporary abstraction.
In this sense, Gur Inbar’s installation addresses the gallery space in a total, holistic manner—as a single unit composed of diverse elements that move between traditional ceramic practice, pottery and large-scale “vessels,” and sculptural works that operate either independently or in direct relation to the space as wall reliefs, engaging in dialogue with the graffiti on the walls.
Back to Back is a turbulent eruption of sculptural and painterly energy that is difficult to describe in stylistic terms. It is a challenging project that pushes ceramic practice to its limits, proposing complex and rich contexts that cross boundaries of sensation—intensity, anxiety, and explosion—uncontained by the polite limits of working within closed, medium-specific categories.
The working process behind the exhibition was complex, filled with changes and divergences—precisely what makes it so compelling and demanding. As the objects were being created, questions continually arose: What are they meant to be? In which direction are they developing? In this sense, the process unfolds in a rhizomatic manner, breaching boundaries and repeatedly generating the need to redefine and reframe it to establish a clear conceptual framework. Such a process is indeed fascinating, yet inherently unstable, leaving a fundamental question as to how it can be described at all. In this respect, the curatorial text—and my work as curator— “chases” and follows the artist: I must attempt to describe and interpret a process that is almost boundless, changing before one’s eyes and developing in a serpentine way in multiple directions.
The outcome presented in the exhibition is meant to raise open-ended questions, activate the eye and our perceptual capacities, and connect the gallery to its surrounding urban environment—Kiryat HaMelacha—as a composite of industrial buildings, art spaces, graffiti, small-scale industry, and white-cube galleries presenting “art.”
Curator: Tsibi Geva
Opening: Thursday, 5.2.2026, 19:30
Gallery talk: Friday, 13.3.2026, 11:30
Closing: Saturday, 21.3.2026, 14:00
