Background: Yasmin Barkani-Rozental
Omer Tiroche Gallery is proud to present Background, a solo exhibition by Yasmin Barkani-Rozental, curated by Mor Reshef Sivan. This exhibition examines and illustrates the different stages of the development and process of Rozental’s new body of work. With each canvas she takes us on a journey where she is faced with her struggles of finding balance in her compositions, which culminate in the combination of her hyperrealism and pure abstraction. Rozental draws inspiration from photography and most significantly her immediate surrounding of friends and family, meticulously capturing small gestures and expressions. In depicting these moments Rozental is also reflecting on her experiences of self-recognition and artistic growth.
Following the birth of her two daughters, Rozental stopped working for a period of time and, upon her return to painting, she grappled with the difficulties of addressing her pictorial backgrounds. Her focus had solely been on the figurative depictions of her loved one. The space that surrounded them was secondary and immaterial to her, so much so that she literally blended them altogether. These large-scale canvases, such as her Mona and Matan paintings, leave her huge figures in an abstract limbo, highlighting the emptiness behind them. Rozental feared she was leaving her characters floating in the canvas without any support, casting them as surreal beings.
The struggle of filling these empty backgrounds led Rozental to another creative break, but thankfully this involuntary pause was abruptly interrupted when her brother Boaz Barkani, an abstract expressionist artist, came to her with a solution. He proposed that she go back to painting and learn to grapple with her issues through looking at his abstract works, filled with expressive, large singular brushstrokes. Rozental was to paint her figures in the foreground of her brother’s abstract background. With his support, she found a new medium to lay the foundation for her work. This stage of her progression is highlighted in her pieces Baji 1 and Baji 2.
From there, Rozental rapidly developed as she learnt how to master and form her own abstract backgrounds. She experimented with pouring paint onto fabrics and mixing industrial dyes diluted with turpentine. Rozental saw how the control that she so stringently applied in creating her figures was futile when using her new techniques to fill the space, there was no ability of anticipating the final result. Rosenthal compared this uncontrollable fluid sensation of creating the background to the properties of water. She immersed her figures into their new settings, blurring the boundaries between the sharpness of her characters with the wild surreal background, as can be seen in her painting Halina.
This exhibition Background is the culmination of 15 years of Rozental’s focus on hyperrealism and her battle of placing her figures onto supporting backgrounds. Now she has finally overcome the fear of the uncontrollable which dictated her work for so long. Her expression is formulated through her experimentation, which is illustrated in works such as Big Girl and Little Girl. Subsequently she has returned to her original small-scaled canvases that she previously favored and incorporates all that she has learnt in finding harmony and balance through the combination of her abstract backgrounds with her detailed figures.
Yasmin Barkani-Rozental was born in Sha’ar Hagolan and grew up in Delia. Today she lives and works in her studio in Shefayim. She graduated from HaMidrasha, with a fine arts degree. Her works are in various Israeli private collections and she has great success with numerous solo and group exhibition at local galleries.
