Rome Gallery Tours

FALLING IN LINE | 14 Dec 2011 - 25 Feb 2012
curated by Giorgia Calò


The exhibition is the first in a series of four exhibiting events the gallery has scheduled over one year (December 2011 – December 2012). The whole project, titled About Paper. 

Israeli Contemporary Art, curated by Giorgia Calò, will see the participation of Hilla Ben Ari, Maya Attoun, Yifat Bezalel, Maya Zack, Etty Abergel, Yael Balaban and Ofri Cnaani. 

These seven artists belong to different generations and work on different themes, whose common denominator is paper, adapted to their individual research for the creation of site-specific installations. The artists  focus on various themes, ranging from meta-communication to reflections on female vulnerability, from the representation of an illusory, strongly aesthetic dimension, to the depiction of epic places,  from the presence/absence of man to the ephemeral nature of memory.

As can be deduced from the exhibition’s title, Falling in Line, the visual processes of Maya Attoun and Hilla Ben Ari are characterized by linear elements that give birth to a shared, single installation, thus activating a relationship between their respective works and the space that contains them. The combined effect of lines crossing and zigzagging through imaginary or real grids and textures, generates intermittent movements that are intended to cause tension between a rational sense of order and a more introspective, chance-driven tendency.
The exhibition’s title also reveals a phonetic similarity to the expression "Falling in Love", thus introducing another issue tackled by the artists, namely the inextricable relationship between physical and emotional oscillation.

Maya Attoun is showing a series of installations that go beyond the idea of drawing itself, involving various media such as sculpture, found objects, wall paper and sound.  Each work combines visual themes, scientific  notions and literary, mostly neo-gothic, references. For instance, Rope (Ofelia) is a  black pencil drawing  on two paper sheets, which depicts two hands holding a rope. A wall paper work showing a black dripping will cover part of the gallery wall, on which the drawing itself is exhibited,  reaching the ground and becoming part of another work titled Moving. The latter is a sound installation consisting in a record player with a broken ceramic turntable. The needle emits sounds as it bounces on the turntable’s crack, evoking a strongly emotional state of being.

Hilla Ben Ari is exhibiting a series of works she especially created for this exhibition, among them a large-size piece depicting three female figures connected to each other by a woven texture, formed by paper stripes and yarns. The frailty of paper, and the movement determined by its particular texture, creates 'animated' figures in space, which almost become three-dimensional, thus emphasizing an approach characterized by perpetual instability. In the second gallery space, recently recast as a “project room”, Hilla Ben Ari is also presenting her video "Dusk", where the image of a female figure placed horizontally and slightly raised above the ground hovers in a sort of sterile detachment.



Galleria Marie-Laure Fleisch
Vicolo Sforza Cesarini, 3A
tel +39 06 688 91936
info@galleriamlf.com