Raya Redlich 1946 -2002
Curator: Ronit Zor
Opening: 6/7/17 at 19:30
Gallery talk: 21/7/17 at 11:30
Closing: 26/8/17
Raya Redlich at the time made courageous decisions with the choices she made about her work preferring to ignore pretty art and instead to expose her pain and the pain of existence in a place with wars and killing. She was a pioneer in dealing with political and social issues in her work. Already as a young girl after hearing the Eichmann trial she understood that in her work she would not be able to ignore the evil and the cruelty.
Raya is a multi-disciplinary artist drawing, painting and sculpting, but most of her work was done in ceramics. Despite her excellent skills she chose to focus on the “imperfect” and to exhibit works that were fragmented and distorted. These decisions became her frustrations; in the ceramic world of the 70’s, her obvious place, most ceramists did functional work and the depth of the ideas behind her work were not understood. In the Israeli art world, ceramics was considered marginal and so from the outset her battle for recognition was lost. She often expressed her disappointment in her position as a prominent maker and head of the ceramic department in the Haifa University, that ceramics did not receive its deserved place in Israeli art despite its inherent connection with archaeology and the local landscape.
Raya left a very rich body of work, making the viewer face the imperfect and its implications on the human condition. In her opinion, only by facing this reality is it possible to make amends for a more moral existence.
