The Fresh Paint Art Fair is the only fair for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv. For its 9th edition and like every year, the curators present their unique format of the "Artists' Greenhouse", where independent artists show and sell (often for the first time since graduating) their work. It's sometimes difficult and overwhelming to find your way between the 50 booths at the greenhouse, so I'm happy to share a really small taste with five artists I loved seeing this year.
The fair takes place between March 28th - April 1st at the Steinhardt Museum for Natural History which will open its doors this Summer at the Tel Aviv University.
Also not to miss at this event are Tal Engelstein's Installation at the fair's entrance, the video projects, curated by the CCA and the galleries section.
Adva Goldstone graduated from the Bezalel BFA Program last Summer, and at the greenhouse you'll be able to see pieces from her final exhibition - large scale paintings of minimalistic figures and smaller collages, based on vogue magazines. I loved seeing the contrast between these two media and subject matters. Using a very colorful palette of acrylic paint and markers, Goldstone taps into contemporary issues of representation and illusion- abstracting all figures, wether the women in the magazines or the enigmatic persons and forms in the paintings.
Untitled, acrylic and marker on a Vogue magazine
I first saw this series of drawings at the projects room of Rosenfeld Gallery and the presentation at the fair is truly beautiful. At only 25, Karam Natour who is enrolled at the MFA degree at Bezalel Academy, has developed a unique style in his digital drawings, realized on his computer. These delicate yet powerful pieces, are like fragments from a personal diary, where the artist's unconscious and conscious worlds meet and where he questions and criticizes the art world, religion, culture and our society, with a lot of humor and wittiness. I highly recommend watching this video for more about this promising artist.
Digital Drawing, 50x50 cm
Daniel Oksenberg is presenting a series of seven large scale, rectangular paintings. I have a soft spot for artists using social media as the starting point of their creation and this is the case of Daniel Oksenberg, whose paintings are inspired by photographs he takes with his smartphone and posts on his favorite social media channel, Instagram. That's only the start of the painting, the result is surprising, totally unique, in its composition and colors, and makes the viewers and the artist rethink familiar narratives and situation from a new perspective.
"Car inspection stickers", 2017, Oil, industrial paint, oil pastels, spray paint, markers and pencils on canvas, 186X86 cm
Photograph: Kobi Bachar
I've been following this artist since her ambitious and successful final project at the Shenkar School in 2015. Naama Roth works between the medium of painting, sculpture and installation, Her pieces offer a contemporary take on modernist processes. One of my favorite works at the booth is "Tribute to Some, 2015', what looks like a revisited version of an air conditioning filter and is a playful wink to modernist masters and to the renowned Israeli artist, Yaacov Agam.
Tribute to Some, 2015, mixed media, 57.5x57.5 cm
LIGAL SOFER
It's refreshing to see an artist honoring materiality, using different materials such as cement, wool, metal and fiberglass fabric. Through them Soffer explores the tension between the two and three dimensional image, preconceived ideas surrounding the "feminine" and the "masculine" in history of art and how one one can document personal and universal memory.
20 square meters, 2017, 80x90 cm, Iron net, concrete and synthetic wool