"Ithaca" 2025 Group Exhibtion Rehovot Art Gallery Curator: Avshalom Suliman Artists: Avital Cnaani // Inbar Frim // Inon Khalfon // Avishai Platek // Rotem Rozenboim // Katrin Tolkovsky Imagine a house. Imagine three floors, white walls, an inner courtyard separating the dusty street from the narrow staircase. In the past, this building housed a wholesale supplier, a shoe factory, and a garage; gradually, the industrial spaces were converted into apartments occupied by individuals, and later also couples and families, giving rise to a community. When the building’s residential use was later prohibited, it re-assumed its original purpose, and today houses artists’ studios. The exhibition focuses on three pairs of artists who share work spaces in this building at 14 Rabbeinu Hananeel Street in southern Tel Aviv, while also living as partners. The exhibition, born of the friendship between the couples, explores the productive tensions stimulated by working in a “shared home.” The exhibition’s second central theme is the tension characteristic of life as a couple. In The Rock of Contention, Inon Khalfon and Katrin Tolkovsky shattered a pair of cameras on the floor of their shared studio. The fragments were wrapped in clay and glue, in a symbolic act of preservation that transformed them into an opaque, stone-like object. The X-ray photograph of this “rock of contention” is an image of a couple whose relational life is composed of private fragments. The internal tension stems from the desire to devote oneself to personal creativity, alongside the desire to function as part of a family unit. The exhibition title Ithaca alludes to the journey undertaken by the mythical Greek war hero Odysseus, who strives tirelessly to return to Ithaca, to his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus. Upon his return, however, he discovers that he must wage another war – for his home, his family, and his identity. In alluding to this story, the exhibition references the story of every home, and to the eternal journey away from home – and back to it. The works of Inbar Frim and Rotem Rozenboim are remarkably different in terms of their temperament and energy. Rozenboim’s drawings and paintings are inspired by the tradition of Expressionist satire in the spirit of Max Beckmann and George Grosz. The worlds he creates have the quality of humorous yet painful dreams, with scenes unfolding in devastated landscapes or in closed spaces that resemble stage sets of various homes, and which usually appear broken and shrouded in an atmosphere of danger. The nature of the relationships between the characters is vague, as is their identity – brothers and sisters, couples, love triangles – all appear dispassionate yet filled with pathos. If we think about Rozenboim’s scenes in terms of “home” and “family,” we are left with a vision that is at once nightmarish, hilarious, and heartbreaking. Frim is a ceramicist who creates drawings, reliefs, and installations alongside more traditional vessels. In this body of works her activity revolves around material degradation and the fragmentation of forms. Eclipse is a series of graphite drawings formed by placing paper over skeletons created from liquid porcelain on the potter's wheel. The centrifugal force of the spinning wheel and the pressure of the graphite record the traces of the hardened material on the sheet of paper, while simultaneously destroying the original. The series Body-Soul features porcelain vases decorated with drawings of female deer and tigers, wolves, gazelles and dragons, all resembling prehistoric cave drawings. She flattens the vessels before firing them, so that the results form the traces of a process in which creation and destruction serve as opposing and complementary forces. The plates bearing illustrations jointly created by the Frim-Rozenboim couple for the exhibition perform as a point of encounter between their respective characters, temperaments, and imaginations. Similar forces of destruction and construction operate in the works of Katrin Tolkovsky, whose unique language is rooted in the traditional technique of wall engraving (sgraffito). In her studio, she creates portable plaster walls on large canvases, from which she extracts organic shapes that seem to grow out of one another. Her compositions are force fields formed by the feverish and repetitive movement of engraving, peeling, and digging into the surface. They present what the canvas-wall allows her to expose, and in this sense constitute a moment of revelation and presence rather than reproduced images. Displayed alongside Frim's engraved, flattened and fired vessels, Tolkovsky's works tell stories of hunting and gathering in the natural environment outside the shared home. Hunting is also the archetypal image at the heart of the works by Inon Khalfon, appearing as an analogy for both seeing and photography. The photographs were taken over the past two years during visits to Nabdin, a small village in the Czech Republic. The series of watchtowers on display here was captured on long hikes during which the photographer takes the roll of a hunter going out into the field and navigating by intuition and rumor, sometimes walking dozens of kilometers to bring back a single frame. The observation towers he locates in the agricultural landscape are images of a protected interior planted in a perilous exterior. In contrast to the tough, masculine towers, the photographs of the dead/sleeping gazelle, the eggs in the nest and the pair of crocodiles should be read as a gentle expression of close observation. Together, they form a triptych centered on the need to protect one’s family. On the eve of the war and after years of living in Tel Aviv, Avital Cnaani and Avishai Platek moved to Kabri, Avital's kibbutz. After a period of shelling and daily danger, they moved to Kibbutz Nachshon, only recently returning home to the northern border. Cnaani's remarkably subtle works are shaped by the visual language she has developed in the mediums of drawing, sculpture, installation, and abstract printmaking, which capture an essence that is at once tangible and elusive: a bird's wing, a hill or valley, the movement of water. The current exhibition features colorful prints that are characterized by clear forms, areas of bold color and clear surfaces that bring to mind aquatic landscapes bathed in sunlight. Alongside them are monochromatic drawings and etchings that portray dark landscapes and violent movement. Most of the works were created before the current war, yet they all seemed to be overshadowed by a dark cloud that cannot be easily dispeled. Avishai Platak is a painter whose feet are firmly planted on the ground, and whose craft is that of a painter working in nature. His drawings, prints and paintings are all images created by a master of painting from observation. Platek often travels through the landscape on solo trips or as a guide for painting groups, returning to the studio with sketches, studies, photographs, and sometimes finished paintings. His compositions ask the traditional question: What does it mean to be a local painter? The ink drawings on paper and canvas and the small paintings he exhibits present cactus (Sabra) hedges and silhouettes of cypress and pine trees, which offer two metaphors for place: the landscape as a clash of cultures, as well as a harmonious expanse of natural splendor.