Reflection / Boris Katz

Curator: Nir Harmat

Opening: Thursday, 29/6/23 at 19:30

Gallery Talk: Friday, 14/7/23 at 11:30

Closing: Saturday, 26/8/23 at 14:00

Boris Katz (b.1964, Russia) creates a series of torsos installed as a circle of characters reflecting each other, the observer and itself. The works present different views functioning as a cumulative and many-faced self-portrait that to a large extent describe the maker himself and at the same time echo the surroundings with a cultural-social-political outlook creating a reflection where the personal reflects the universal.  He uses a system of signs and attributes; some are identifiable and conscious, and others are illusive.  The circle of characters in white clay, back-to-back, marks an enigmatic territory that protects the instinct to express and preserve memory, to ingrain a look that will become an organic part of the memory or identity of someone else.  It is a cumulative territory of shadows that turns the allegory to the moral of itself.  

The seven untitled sculptures and the large circle they draw touch on the elements of the personality and the different faces of the human soul; freedom and liberty, eros and passion, anxiety and danger, man as a mold of his cultural and social environment, and the way in which the environment influences and forms reality, as well as circles of life and death as a “memento mori” – remember death that hovers above all these. 

The ceramic sculptures are dissociated from signs that identify a particular character, glistening and expropriated from concrete time or place. The making process and the material are simultaneously real and allegorical – like an archaeological dig into remains of reality that has not yet happened. They act as a reflection that complements or distorts the person standing opposite.  

The series of works are reminiscent of initiation sculptures with human characteristics found in the bottom of the pyramid, like containers of the soul.  Katz, in his sculptures, presents a type of internal journey, where the complexity of body and soul function between eternity and passing existence.  The installation on a round stage choreographs the path around the pieces and the visitor must “look him in the eyes” creating a circle with a unity of opposites compiling a polarized yet full mosaic of existence, memory, and the human soul.