Eva, the solo exhibition by Shay Zilberman, is a tribute and a gesture of reaching out to touch on the past. At the core of the project lies a dialogue Zilberman conducts with the works of Eva Samuel (1904–1989), one of the pioneering figures of ceramic art in Israel.
Eva Samuel was born in Germany to the rabbi of the large Jewish community in Essen. She was an artist, craftswoman, and entrepreneur, and after immigrating to Palestine in 1931, she founded HaYotzer (“The Maker”), the first ceramic workshop in the Jewish settlement in Jerusalem (1932–1934). Later, together with Paula Aronson—her close collaborator at HaYotzer—she established the Kad veSefel factory, which operated in Rishon LeZion from 1934 until 1979. Zilberman’s first encounter with her work was through vessels and figurines produced in the studio during the 1930s and 1940s. Their simplicity and distinctive palette were not only visually compelling but also appeared to become what would later develop into a common cultural and aesthetic in Israel.
The first part of the project began during an artist-residency at the Benyamini Center, where Zilberman created a disrupted production line. He used of the original plaster molds with which Samuel cast figurines depicting folkloric, Eretz-Israeli characters. The exhibition presents a series of new sculptures that undermine the “proper” productive order of the original. Zilberman captures the raw, internal form of the original sculpture, exposing the inner cavities of the figures in a process that reverses the logic of the original reproduction—from “inside out.” His renewed-yet-disrupted production line unfolds as a procession of hybrid acts: “stumps” that bring past and present together.
The second series include unglazed vessels in shades of reddish-brown, yellow, and black. At the top of each stands a replica of one of Samuel’s miniature figures, functioning as a kind of sentinel guarding and sealing the opening, embodying an unrealized potential of the vessel: a sculpture that encloses an inaccessible interior space.
In a series of collages based on photographic images drawn from books and catalogues, Zilberman reaches out to an artist who was never widely recognized as a painter, bringing her closer to his own practice as a collage artist.
For Zilberman, the encounter with the past becomes possible through a fractured process of dismantling and re-examination. The exhibition proposes a meditation on the meeting between an “exotic” past and a dystopian future. The gesture made by Zilberman constitutes a dialogue—real or imagined—with that past, represented in the exhibition through the figure of Samuel as one of the “mothers” of Israeli ceramics. The exhibition invites us to linger over the significance of the singular moment in which we hold something tangible that was dreamed, shaped, and made in the past—examining it and asking ourselves what remains of the image whose fragments we are gathering here and now.
Curator: Avshalom Suliman
Opening: Thursday, 5.2.2026, 19:30
Gallery talk: Friday, 13.3.2026, 11:30
Closing: Saturday, 21.3.2026, 14:00
