Reveal / Jorge Karelic

The Small Gallery

Curator: Einav Baranes Eliasov

Opening: Friday 8/7/22 at 11:00

Online gallery talk: Wednesday, 24.8.2022, 19:30- To register

Closing: Saturday 27/8/22 at 14:00

Jorge first touched clay in 1970 as an 18-year-old boy when he went to a pottery class in Uruguay, where he was born, studying with an artist who specialized in pre-Colombian decoration and the use of burnished engobes.  The influence of his Uruguayan teacher together with life in Israel and creating in Neve Tzedek in Tel Aviv led to a personal decorative language that was apparent in his first exhibition in 1984 “Neve Tzedek” in the Horace Richter gallery in Jaffa.  He presented a body of work with motives from the area where he lived, Neve Tzedek, using burnished engobes.  Another strong influence in his creative language is his teacher Prof. Lidia Zavatsky.  Her various series of works from her different exhibitions encouraged Jorge to create new series of works, each time with different forms, decoration, colour, and each time evaluating the qualities and limits of the clay and satisfy his material curiosity. 

In this exhibition, Reveal, Karelic shows two series, one of self-portraits made several years ago and never exhibited.  The portraits are made of body casts where each sculpture has a different surface treatment giving the viewer the opportunity to a broad perspective of Karelic and his state of mind at various times in his life.  The portraits were made with the attitude that we have many faces and that we wear ourselves differently in various situations. 

The second series are three dimensional amorphic bodies where the removal of clay create a layered topography covering the entire surface.  The layers expose and hide some of the work and are brightly coloured.

The two groups of works show Karelic’s artistic approach of continuously searching for new forms, bright colours, motives that each in their own way express the concept he wishes to express and so become one story.

A few months ago, Jorge celebrated his 70^th birthday, a long material journey from the age of 18 as a young boy in Uruguay. This milestone led him to reveal the portrait series alongside the amorphic objects.  His personal maturity and deepened material understanding, and self-acceptance enabled him to remove the layers that were blocked over the years and to show them to the public with the aim of continuing to exercise his imagination, and wisdom of hands.