In the courtyard of Zohar Gotesman’s studio lie scattered fragments of sculptures made of marble, stone, wood, concrete, and polymer, which he created over the years. Among them is a crude marble piece he carved with hammer and chisel at the age of sixteen. Gotesman has come a long way from the boy who tried to teach himself to carve in stone, to the young man who traveled to Italy and France to specialize in both traditional and contemporary sculpture, yet his love for stone, archaeology, and ancient art has remained intact throughout the years.

Marble, the oldest material in Gotesman’s sculptures, is the result of a slow, millennia-long geological metamorphosis from limestone, involving the shifting of tectonic plates, heat and pressure. Rock, a fundamental substance of the planet, carries traces of other materials, distant epochs, and deep geological processes. Gotesman approaches marble with a sense of eternal awe, seeking to merge with the material so completely that their encounter becomes almost palpable in the finished work. Looking back through the layers of substance before their crystallization, Gotesman performs an act of subtraction on the hard, raw marble, guided by reverence for the material’s history, as well as by precision, attunement, and dialogue. In return, the marble furnishes him with a rich array of colors, transparencies, and textures. Working with a fragile medium, one that imposes limitations and dictates the image, allows Gotesman to re-examine the images hewn in the stone and push the material’s boundaries as well as his own.

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Gotesman’s two marble works featured in the exhibition—one, photographic, the other, a freestanding sculpture—reflect the interrelations between artist and matter. In a self-portrait of the artist sleeping, embracing a marble figure, Gotesman seeks to unite a living organism with a mineral. Through photographic documentation of a moment of intimacy, he preserves the interaction between sculptor and stone, perpetuating the union before separation, before their ways diverge and the sculpture leaves the studio. Seeing himself as part of a lineage of sculptors, Gotesman ties himself to them and to the material. The marble figure of the sleeping woman is a tribute to an anonymous 2nd century Roman sculpture, Sleeping Hermaphroditus, itself a replica of a lost Hellenistic original. The work @TITLE@ encapsulates the history of sculpture, allowing the artist to become the hand that sculpts the sculptors, positioning himself as one more link in an enduring chain.

Through the encounter with different periods—ranging from geological eras to the present—Gotesman repositions himself in relation to the material each time anew. In his new work, he traverses the timeline, linking ancient Greece to Italian Futurism; archaic axes and hammers to a robotic sculpting assistant; the work with hard, massive marble to the possibility of achieving delicate textures and fine resolutions. These juxtapositions allow him to breathe old-new life into ancient stone. Throughout the work process, Gotesman places supports between the work’s fragile elements. Just before completion, he removes these props and himself from the stone, releasing the sculpture into the world.

A two-way movement frequently occurs in Ben Hagari’s works, which trace various material bodies of knowledge through video. Each time, his gaze shifts between inquisitive external observation of the material and a desire to assimilate into it and sense it from within. This recurring dynamic, unfolding in his video works through clay, leather, graphite, vegetables, color, and light, draws out voluminous and corporeal qualities from the two-dimensional images, until one can almost feel the physical materiality projected on screen. The artist’s figure, reborn—as a pencil point, the hollow interior of a vessel, or a negative image—achieves complete identification with a different material body each time, becoming the conduit of its mass in the world. This intimate gesture, which allows him to be both creator and created, merges artist and medium, dissolving the boundary between subject and object.

From a young age, Hagari wandered among theater sets, watching worlds come into being and shift before his eyes. Now, he crafts his own. The temporary spaces he constructs rely on in-depth research and tactile engagement with the material. Using familiar mechanical apparatuses, he questions the existing, confronting his figures and the video medium in which he works with existential quandaries about truth, essence, and identity. In doing so, he challenges the visible and exposes the hidden.

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The video Potter’s Will unites the origin of the material with the origin of the maker. Engaged with an act of creation, it presents the cyclical movement through the various images and gestures that unfold within it. On set, Hagari reconstructs a sculpture studio mounted on a rotating platform, inspired by the Black Maria, the first American film production studio built in New Jersey on a turntable, with a retractable roof, to follow the sun and let in natural light for Thomas Alva Edison’s early films. On this stage, Hagari chooses to position a renowned master ceramist, Paul Chaleff, circling a lump of clay which remains static at the center of the wheel. With sensual hand movements, he shapes it into a jug, surrounded by dozens of identical replicas of the same vessel. Finally, Hagari physically immerses himself in the scene, observing the material from within. He assumes the role of a prehistoric, identity-less figure, crafting his self-portrait as raw material.

Hagari seeks to grasp the primordial, the birth of the cinematic image, the creation of man and matter. Through an infinite video loop he envelops the senses wordlessly, weaving together ancient and contemporary myths to generate a continuous cycle of birth and death. A photograph of the serpent coiled around Hagari’s body, as he gropes his way with eyes shut, is exhibited alongside the video—a visual cue signaling the artist’s yearning to be reborn as the work itself. Through the rotating stage, with the fixed, stable vessel at its center, and through his descent into the heart of the material, Hagari inquires: are we the axis around which the world turns—or are we trapped within it?

A retrospective look at Shahar Yahalom’s works indicates a broad range of engagement with materials—from paper, glass, concrete, tar, and various metals to fish bones. A close examination of her sculptures reveals an intimate relationship between the artist and her materials: her ability to preserve each substance’s essential properties, while also coaxing out unexpected textures, colors, and behaviors we never knew existed.

In recent years, clay has become a dominant material in Yahalom’s work. She turned to clay out of a desire to create objects resilient to weather conditions, requiring no human care. Through ceramics, she creates manmade stones. In a rapid process of heating and cooling mud—a mineral substance—she produces solid, stable sculptures that need no preservation or coating. She culls her imagery from history and from clay’s diverse incarnations, ranging from the ancient figurine and jug to the luxury porcelain knives, armored ceramic vest, and decorative garden gnomes.

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The new work, Stone-Wood, is a floor piece made of clay, wood, fabric, and plaster. Its base was constructed after a photograph of the façade of a house in the town of Alsfeld, Germany, where Yahalom’s grandmother was born in 1924. Flattening the original façade, Yahalom builds a new composition atop it, a scene composed of object remnants and invasive species.

Through sculptural gestures, she retraces the familiar steps of construction: sketching, assembling the frame, filling, and coating. Yahalom chooses to expose the layers and materials, emphasizing the hidden cracks formed in the crackle glaze that envelops the ceramic objects. By sanding the works with manganese—a black pigment—she drives the paint into the cracks, bringing them to the surface.

This new work encapsulates Yahalom’s overarching perspective on image, material, and body. The orphaned house is emptied of the life that once teemed within it, stripped of its meaning as a safe haven. It sheds its function, leaving behind a flattened shell. Yahalom regards the remaining space as a potential new ground for the still sculptures. Her working body becomes a receptacle for the intergenerational memory of a home she never inhabited. Through her body, the material is granted another incarnation in the world; the material, in turn, offers her a vessel for seeking hidden meanings.

Textiles entered Gili Avissar’s life as a working material in childhood, when he dreamed of becoming a fashion designer. Over time, fabric became an inseparable part of his body. Its properties and behavior as a material enabled him to develop a language uniquely his own. The feel of cloth on skin, its boundless color range, the oscillation between elasticity and rigidity, the fabric’s ability to bend and conform to his body in any situation, its capacity to wrap and cover, to assume and shed identities—all of these, along with the opportunity to conjure up a new world from a flat, two-dimensional square, over and over again, provided Avissar with a realm of freedom, fantasy, and liberation.

Two primary actions define Avissar’s relationship with textile: sewing and unstitching. He alternates between them, gradually connecting and separating, stitching and unraveling. He begins by stitching one unit of fabric to another, then adds whole components side by side, until they merge into a single, cohesive installation. The act of dismantling unfolds in a similar manner, until he finally unstitches and disassembles the fabric and thread units back into the raw material. This repetitive act leads to the disintegration of previous images, yet retains the traces of earlier work, charging the material with additional memory.

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In his new work, @@, Avissar chooses to generate the space from within. Over the past year and a half, during the war, he left his studio and started creating temporal bubbles in the venues where his exhibitions were staged. These are site-specific installations, but not preplanned ones; environments in which action unfolds in real time. Into the gallery’s time capsule, Avissar brings parts of wearable objects, sewn in the past two months, alongside pieces created years ago, removed from previous installations. The composition in the space arises from an intimate familiarity with his material coupled with lingering and a renewed attentiveness to its presence in the space.

The cascading fabrics, hooked chains, and masks suspended beside them were all measured and made in relation to his own body. By suspending these objects in the space, Avissar asks whether they can function as autonomous entities; whether they can maintain their own tonus in his absence. Through the material, he attempts to understand how one sustains stability, how one avoids collapsing into a shapeless mass. The tension between the necessity of his physical presence, which animates these forms, and the desire to let the material stand on its own, becomes particularly poignant against the backdrop of the video work projected within them. The artist’s absent figure hovers within the forms, defined by the negative spaces left by his body parts.

From the outset of her artistic journey, Chen Cohen has used herself as her primary work material. Through the camera lens, she examines herself, observing her body as an image, deconstructing it into its parts, and documenting them. The body as matter is translated into a two-dimensional product, typically reproduced in black-and-white on a Xerox printer. Continuously reshaped by rheumatoid arthritis she developed in her youth, her body offers a visible graph of transformation. Cohen approaches it with unflinching, courageous eyes, yet simultaneously regards it through a detached, external gaze, as if it were not her own.

For Cohen, the connection to the body as a material manifests as an act of drawing. She gathers and catalogues the actions and changes occurring in it, breaking them down into stains and lines. The body is experienced as spaces, silhouettes, and contours, rendered on paper as an object separate from its actual presence in the world. She activates the material, yet she is also the material being activated. The human body as a transient physical substance is charged in her works with fragility and a shell-like quality, as well as with metaphysical and spiritual resonance.

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The act of documentation central to Cohen’s practice takes on a new dimension in her recent work, @TITLE@. Over the past year, Cohen began taking dance classes. Her upright, frozen, treatment-bound body started generating motion in space. Through choreography requiring planning, rehearsal, and flow, Cohen cast aside the present gaze—the here-and-now perspective to which she had grown accustomed—daring to look forward and imagine a future.

Using video—a live, moving camera—Cohen constructs a space of gestures and layers. The work’s foundation is activated by her body, in collaboration with choreographer Hilla Nehushtan. Together, they form the axis around which the work revolves. Through synchronized, repetitive motions, their bodies become a human metronome, setting the rhythm that enfolds the work and serves as its beating heart. Acting as mirrors for one another, each highlights the other’s movements while drawing attention to their differences. Dancers appear in the foreground, “superimposed” onto their shared image like extra layers of skin. Each dancer enacts a single gesture, repeating a mundane act drawn from Cohen’s daily routine.

Through this movement machine, constructed from her own body and the bodies of others, Cohen unfreezes her body from the static image for the first time, and allows it to move. Attuned to time’s rhythm and life’s pulse, she observes herself with fresh eyes. Relying on the heartbeat as a sign of vitality, she succumbs to a new understanding that the body is here to stay.

Steel wool, industrial felt, manipulated MDF boards, black coffee, cotton balls, synthetic turf, and felt office rugs—this is only a partial list of the rich range of materials comprising Gal Weinstein’s works. From his earliest projects, he has been drawn to the cheap, graceless processing of these substances. Into his studio, he chooses to bring materials already transformed into industrial products from wood shavings, cotton fibers, and steel filaments, stripped of the original substance’s appearance and initial properties. Weinstein identifies the latent potential still waiting to be awakened and grants them yet another incarnation. The materiality of his works bursts forth and is physically palpable through the large surfaces, even as the eyes struggle to identify what material they are sensing.

Using self-developed techniques, refined in a homegrown laboratory, and freeing himself from familiar actions and the artistic education he received, Weinstein is drawn to the body of the material. He exposes its embedded idiosyncrasy, thus granting depth to the two-dimensional surface. By breaking matter down into particles, he generates strength and unearths latent coloration in the material itself. Through compression, mixing, and cutting, he creates further defamiliarization and distancing from the material, alongside revelation and renewed intimacy.

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The dual observation capacity, anchored in the material, the surface, and the body within it, has been central to Weinstein’s images since the beginning of his artistic career. He often adopts a bird’s-eye view, observing iconic yet deeply personal landscapes, exploring their constituent elements and the interrelations forged in the intersection of bodies. In the map series, @TITLE@, Weinstein continues his exploration of mapping and division, but diverges from his earlier treatment of cartography. Previous maps referenced traditional geographic renderings that realistically reflect local topography, or medieval maps based on idealized memory and physical traversal. The maps in this new series are meteorological diagrams that chart wind speed and direction, intended to analyze and document the invisible movements of air within a defined space at a specific moment in time.

The transition between different types of maps reflects Weinstein’s changing perspective. Departing from the contemporary realistic maps and the ancient metaphorical ones, he shifts focus from concrete reality, which reflects an existing situation, to observe the terrain as fluid and in flux. The familiar top-down gaze is inverted, and he now looks upward—from earth to sky. The underlying grid, which forms the foundation of all maps, is exposed on the surface. The clear boundaries dissolve and become fluid. When Weinstein’s inner experience meets the external radar, he introduces his own changes to the maps. The lines marking pressure, altitude, and velocity are shifted and erased, leaving only illegible, neutralized traces. Unable to locate himself in the past or future, Weinstein opts to inhabit the present, to move with the wind.

Lihi Turjeman’s paintings unfold across a monumental scale on walls, floors, even ceilings. Before ever knowing what she will paint, she subjects the raw canvases to a process of manipulation. Working with pigments and oxides diluted in water, she saturates the fabric with color using squeegees and brushes. Traces of folds, water stains, and new coloration become fixed on the dry canvases, imbuing them with formal cues. Turjeman paints through intuitive movement, allowing the initial spread of material to serve as a point of departure, from which the images concealed within it begin to surface.

Created in a building that doubled as both her home and studio, Turjeman’s first body of work, in which she peeled and tore off layers of wall, relied on the strappo technique (Italian for “to tear off”) used in the Renaissance to detach fresco paintings from walls. When the building was later demolished, the works produced within it preserved a palpable sense of her presence—and that of those who had inhabited the site before her. They formed a capsule of material and experiential memory, their essence continuing to echo in the pieces that followed. Turjeman’s practice drifts through multiple timelines, traditions, and cultures. She finds inspiration in mythological, archaeological, scientific, and contemporary imagery, yet always maintains a direct connection to the site of making, the painting body, and the landscape before her.

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The Passion Façade is being exhibited here for the first time, nearly a decade after its creation during an artist residency at the Parisian Cité Internationale des Arts in 2015. Inspired by European architecture, the piece is composed of four sheets, each evoking a building façade. Stretched to cover the studio walls, the canvases were coated with a substance mimicking the texture of stone, which fixed and highlighted the original grid of canvas folds. Into the resulting walls and stones, Turjeman drew fragmented images, ranging from biblical narratives to artistic symbols. Partial figures—resembling either carved statues or spectral presences—appear beside symbolic images such as an open book and a gravestone, ostensibly suspended in a realm of Doomsday, or perhaps its aftermath, their bodies bearing tragic marks of violence, distress, pain, and suffering, underscoring their personal and collective helplessness.

When the canvases were unrolled in preparation for this exhibition, Turjeman discovered that the materials absorbed into them had not frozen in time. Even after the work’s completion, the layers and paints continued to shift and react. The materials applied to the canvas, including iron oxides, had changed, rusted, and charged the images with additional shades and layers. Although created nearly ten years ago, the work reveals itself as a living entity, still reflecting the surface and time of its showing. These canvases demand movement, compelling the viewer to draw closer and then step back, to observe physically and historically rediscovered images from the past, until they appear as though conjured from the present.