Most of 2020 has passed with us being closed-in, isolated, and socially distant. In a world without outside we have all, out of will or out of fear, moved inwards. The world epidemic has forced us ‘to introvert’ and opened a space for discreet introspection. 

​

Inner Space grew out of the experience of these pandemic times: the turning inward, the ‘hibernation’, and the need of nurturing both a personal and a collective inner space. 

​

This is a quiet exhibition, pensive and intimate - with paintings by Shelly Reich, glass vessels by Noam Dover and Michal Cederbaum, and drawings, spices, and scented glass ampoules by Shahar Afek. We commissioned a wall painting by Avi Nevo to accompany those who enter our inner space from the bustling street corner of Frishman and Dizengoff.

​

It’s been a long time that I have been looking for the right expression for these times; not just an expression of criticism or discontent but also of a new beginning and a discovery. And where else can we search for anything new if not inside, within our soul, spirit, and through the imagination? These vehicles of exploration have been neglected in our contemporary culture, a culture which highlights everything external and extroverted: action, appearances, and frantic reactions. No, the outside holds nothing new, it is overused, abused, stretched too thin like a surface or a skin without a body. The inner space holds new promises and old mysteries, if we only allow ourselves the time and courage to stop and reflect. Following the lines of the works in this exhibition, which are all folding inwards, curving on themselves to create zones of recession and small turbulences, we discover the engines that can propel us forward,

backward, upward and downward in a spiral.  

​

It is remarkable that this intimate exhibition, which concentrates on emotion, spirit, and the coming into being of shades of consciousness, receives such a wonderful book to accompany it. This is the result of our cooperation with Sternthal Books. I suppose these pages, wrapped in bare canvas like the paintings in the show, could be used as evidence for how it felt like to be living in our times--a kind of a time capsule of a worldwide historical moment, the beginning of a revolution or the beginning of an end.