The Wild Swans

Talya Raz

Curator: Tali Tamir

16.01.2020 - 22.02.2020

The Wild Swans

In the exhibition "The Wild Swans", Raz displays an interdisciplinary work of art that spreads across the entire gallery walls and includes oil paintings on canvas, murals that surround the canvases and connect them together, and a video-performance artwork. The result is an environment that creates a sensation of totality, an overgrown forest where everything intertwines and nourishes off each other.

The name "The Wild Swans" refers to Hans Christian Andersen’s story, in which eleven cursed brothers are transformed into swans. Their sister removes the curse by sewing cloaks from nettle leaves, but she is unable to complete one of the cloaks, and the twelfth brother remained with a white swan wing instead of his right arm.

The video work, as well as the oil paintings, depicts a scene of tangled forest in which a man/swan abides. Instead of the redemptive sister, Raz focuses on the younger brother who failed to lift the curse completely. His hybrid existence captivates Raz, and she builds a fairy tale, with hallucination like narrative in which she embodies the swan's identity and builds herself a nest of twigs and branches in a stream in the forest, and where she falls asleep in an act of calm and acceptances.

Raz works are inspired by the German expressionist painting of the 1930s, as well as the neo-expressionism of the 1980s: rich and deep colors, intense brushwork, condensed textures and emotions, a strong closeness to nature, and an awareness of Eros lurking and impregnating the very fabric of unrestrained nature. At the same time, her paintings raise questions of hybrid identities and the ability to accept and love an alternative life. Raz constructs the exhibition as an experience of strolling in the woods, aspiring to create emotional and intellectual baggage for the viewers. 

About the artist:

Talya Raz, born 1975, lives and works in Tel Aviv, and is a member of Alfred Gallery. She is a graduate of the MFA program in Haifa University (2007) and has a B.A in Fine Arts and Psychology from Haifa University (2003), attended the Free Academy in The Hague, Netherlands. Raz has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Israel, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands.

Burn the Bridges Down:

The Wild Swans is the ninth and final exhibition in the annual theme: Burn Your Bridges Down.

The word Bridge describes an architectural functional structure that connects two places, and is commonly used as a metaphor. The command Burn your bridges is used as a strategic plan in situations of siege or persecution.

Bridges symbolise physical and mental territories, changes and transitions between periods and interpersonal relationships. We are accustomed to thinking that the path to growth and progress must be based on creating continuity and bridging gaps. Sometimes, however, the only way to move forward is to reinvent ourselves, to rise up like a phoenix from painful memories. It is to sever relationships irreversibly. To burn the bridges so that we can no longer go back, and in order to prevent demons from the past from continuing to persecute us.

In the 2019 exhibition we will examine the concept of burn your bridges down in a variety of aspects: personal, intimate, political, historical, gender and social.