A launch celebrating the publication of a new artist book by Ruti de Vries, accompanied by a musical performance by soprano Tal Ganor, poetry readings by Larissa Miller and Sharon Kantor, and a conversation between the participants.

Ruti de Vries (b. 1989, Tel Aviv) lives and works in Tel Aviv. She holds an MFA from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, 2015, and a B.Ed. in Art and Education from Hamidrasha Faculty of the Arts, Beit Berl College, 2012. A graduate of Artport’s 2024 residency program, she is currently completing an artist residency and exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, supported by Artis. While there, she also printed her new book in collaboration with designer Avi Bohbot.

Over the years, de Vries’s artistic practice has developed like a spiral, gathering more and more motifs and materials without abandoning those that came before. She works across a wide range of media, including installation, sculpture, painting, sewing, graphic art, and animation. Her work draws inspiration from numerous traditions and sources, among them ancient art, folk art, outsider art, fashion, and theater.

Over time, de Vries has constructed a rich lexicon of images, materials, themes, and meanings – a kind of personal cosmology in which distinctions between human and animal, feminine and masculine, organic and artificial begin to dissolve. Ornamentation, patterns, symmetry, and repetition – all defining features of handicraft – recur throughout her work. When brought into contact with sculpture, they generate a productive tension between two-dimensionality and volume, graphic form and sculptural presence, sign and embodiment.

Tal Ganor is a soprano and graduate of the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music at Tel Aviv University and the Israeli Opera’s Meitar Opera Studio. As a soloist with the Israeli Opera, she has performed a wide range of roles, including Belinda in Dido and Aeneas, Zerlina in Don Giovanni, Papagena and Pamina in The Magic Flute, Monica in The Medium, Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro, and Amore in Orfeo ed Euridice.

She has performed with the Teatro Real in Madrid, the Festival della Valle d’Itria in Martina Franca, the Aix-en-Provence Festival, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, the Israel Camerata Jerusalem, the Barrocade Ensemble, and others. She has also performed and recorded with Yoni Rechter, Shem-Tov Levi, and the Tziporela Ensemble, and took part in the production Hubeza at the Cameri Theatre with the Revolution Orchestra.

In 2025, she directed and performed the role of Anna in Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins, a production staged at the Alpha Theatre and supported by a grant from the Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts. Ganor is a recipient of scholarships from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, the Israel Vocal Arts Institute, the Besser Foundation, the Eli Leon Foundation, and the Rotary Club of Martina Franca. At the 2012 Aviv Competitions, she won both the Vocal Performance Prize and the Audience Choice Award.