Underlying Illnesses / Inbar Frim and Rotem Rozenbaum

Curator: Hadassa Cohen
Exhibition Design: Or Shoshani
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

The exhibition, Underlying Illnesses, deals with the archaeology of routine and the moment when it cracks and exposes naked reality.  Through role playing and fooling with different aspects of tragic and comic situations, Inbar Frim and Rotem Rozenbaum infuse a breath of fresh air in daily banality and deliver an empathetic view on humanity. Together, they bring together tradition and contemporary, fragility and cheekiness, undermining situations, to bring to light the deeply hidden layers of human existence. 

Frim and Rozenbaum are life and studio partners.  Frim, working mostly in clay, uses materials that will potentially disintegrate and exploring techniques and primeval actions that are defined as traditional craft.  With deft movements between preservation and disintegration, she extracts from the fired clay skeletons and delicate fossils and evokes extinction prior to the living form.  The drawing style of Rozenbaum is intuitive, sensuous, and vigorous and does not spare imagination or detail.  Over the years he has adopted an absurd, grotesque, and comic approach to drawing and painting inspired by art history and his immediate environment. 

In the studio, one side is covered in white dust: plates, cups, jugs, and tiles at various stages of drying and firing, filing the kiln and metal shelves and painting the large wooden table white.  On the other side of the studio, the strong colors of Rozenbaum are prominent: from the scattered paintings erupt deformed figures, strange objects and animals with meaty colored planes that dance over the canvas.

The meeting point between the two sides, range between drawing and ceramics, wild and constrained, multiple, and unique, creating a frenetic melting pot of Frim and Rozenbaum. The couple produce an impressive line of houseware decorated with decals including ritual jugs, tiles, digital drawings and more.  These products are indicative of the now, which tends towards excessive, carnival and materialistic and yet remain sensitive, inviting invigorating dialog. 

Inbar Frim (b.1981) has a BA in art and teaching art from the Midrasha Beit Berl (2008) and an MA in industrial design from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design (2018). 

Rotem Rozenbaum (b.1980) has a BA in art and teaching art from the Midrasha Beit Berl (2014) and an MA in Art from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design (2022)