"Passage" - Solo Exhibition, The Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, Tel Aviv

June, 2022

My solo exhibition, "Passage", opened June 28th, 5:30-7:30 pm, at The Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, Galil Plaza, in Tel Aviv.

The installation “Passage” strives to raise awareness of issues related to interactions between humans and nature, such as climate change, natural resource exploitation, and the disrupted cycles of the seasons. It seeks to strengthen our compassion and concern for the surroundings, as a corrective and healing response to environmental destruction. These ideas are planted in the installation as abstract graphic experiences that embody different types of personal, family, and collective memories.

In creating the installation, Reshef used prunings from the botanical gardens and urban landscape of Tel Aviv – branches and leaves that were cut out from the circle of life. This waste turned into “treasure”, and now tells a new story through the “corrective” practice of art , which takes the dead and breathes a new spirit into it. Thus, the artistic garden echoes the nearby physical garden.

The “Passage” also relates to the laboratories, research rooms, and libraries within the Steinhardt Museum, and instills the world of humanities and books into the world of nature and botanic gardens. These facilitate the development of knowledge and tools for managing the ecosystem in which we live, and build the scientific base that will enable us, as a community, to move forward.

Rotem Reshef is a painter and installation artist who has shown her works in many solo and group exhibitions in Israel and around the world. Her artistic practice focuses on the human and natural ecosystems, the fragility of life, and the opportunity for a second chance.

The Steinhardt Museum of Natural History

Klausner St 12,

Tel Aviv-Yafo

"Walking on Dry Land" - Solo Exhibition, NYC

June, 2022

My solo exhibition, Walking on Dry Land opened June 14, 6:30-8:30pm, at The Laurie M. Tisch Gallery, in New York and will run through August 28, 2022.

Exhibition curator & director of Lambert Center for Arts + Ideas: Udi Urman

The Laurie M. Tisch Gallery 334 Amsterdam Avenue at 76th Street, New York, NY 10023

Free and open to the public

Offering a haven from the bustling city, Rotem Reshef’s painterly environment is created by two islands of color and texture. While suggesting a site of refuge, the site-specific installation presents a dual perspective of an inner world mirroring an exterior landscape, arresting in time the cycle of seasons. Reshef’s practice proves that painting can shift modes, expand and modify our perception, like a story unfolding.

Reshef’s work alludes to a long history of drifting and wandering both of her own, her families, and all of us who navigate a world of shifting restrictions, the closing and opening of borders and global migration. The movement through the space may allude to the crossing of the red sea, as the dry land offered a fantastical path of rescue and safety, a sudden and unexpected change of events that transformed a catastrophe into a trail for redemption.

Strolling the urban environments like Walter Benjamin’s Flâneur, Reshef picks up traces of abandoned history, signs of lives that existed and vanished - vegetation waste, twigs and scraps of wood, remains of a landscape, either planned or wild, that are gathered once again, into the immortalizing world of art-making. Bringing into the studio these anonymous materials, overlooked and thrown out of the city’s cycle of consumerism, Reshef is offering the idea of Tikkun, healing the existing wounds of life, giving them an additional chance to gain appreciation and beauty.

The current exhibition continues Reshef’s installation from 2020, A Heartfelt Event, that reacted in real-time to the influence of the Covid-19 pandemic and the political turmoil of that year on Israeli society and the artist’s own private life. Yet, this time Reshef reflects on the age “after” the crisis, its anxiety, and unknown consequences.

Opening Reception:

June 14, 6:30-8:30pm

The Laurie M. Tisch Gallery,

334 Amsterdam Avenue at 76th Street,

New York, NY 10023

"Control l Release" & "Imprints" at the new Magasin III Jaffa Books store-gallery

February, 2022

Happy to have "Control l Release" & "Imprints" at the new Magasin III Jaffa Books store-gallery, entirely dedicated to presentation of artist-books and catalogues, created by Israeli artists.

Magasin III Jaffa is an exhibition space, a permanent satellite established in 2018 by Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art from Stockholm, Sweden.

Magasin III Jaffa Books opened to the public in January 2022.