Galería ATC is pleased to announce Indigo Nights, the second exhibition by Alona Harpaz (Tel Aviv) at Galería ATC. Just three years ago, the artist presented her first exhibition in our gallery, Coming Back To Be A Monkey, with great success, after participating in Art Madrid 2020.
In Indigo Nights, the works have a hybrid nature between graphic and pictorial. The artist uses color and line to portray people in her closest circle, including herself. The bodies seem to originate in the environment—in the process of delineation—and are articulated with flat shapes of saturated, fluorescent and metallic colors. These figures are incorporated, however, since they share the same material as the background. In a certain sense, we would say that they are portraits captured in the air, identities that will soon blur to insinuate themselves again in other forms. Fluid and perpetually changing identities, momentary, yet static.
In her new paintings we find motifs present in previous series: cherries, an owl, a rhinoceros, a rooster, parrots and monkeys; they manage to extend their pictorial presence in Indigo Nights with different combinations. A visitor who had the opportunity to examine her previous exhibition in our gallery, Coming Back To Be a Monkey, will remember some of these images. The symbiosis of these elements with her characters suggests additional personal motives of the artist that are unknown to us.
Harpaz combines intense colors in an unusual way and applies them without modulation. When she represents only with a mark, through brush strokes, the form is suggested in a graceful and jovial way. For example, the dark brown spot in her self-portrait “Alma & me”—somewhat reminiscent of Goya—which seems to correspond, after some examination on our part, to a dog; or the gray and salmon-colored shape, in another self-portrait, which turns out to be an owl.
From pop celebration to gothic, glam and avatar sentiment in Matissian compositions, Alona Harpaz continues to investigate ultra-contemporary life in Indigo Nights through intimate and very personal painting.
Alona Harpaz was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1971. Her father was born in a Kibbutz and her mother, from Romania, was a ballet dancer. She currently lives and works in Berlin. Her work is found in important collections, both private and institutional: TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Israel Museum Collection, Richard Prince Collection, Anita & Poju Zabludowicz Collection, Wendy Fisher Collection, Barbara Gladstone Collection, Chadra Collection, Michael L. Hittleman Collection and Sami & Anette Bollag Collection. She studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, and at the International Center of Photography in New York. Her work has been exhibited at Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv; Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; Alessandro of March Gallery, Milan; Ramat Gan Museum, Israel; Tel Aviv Museum; Israel Museum, Tel Aviv; Gropius Bau Museum, Berlin; and SchauFenster Gallery, Berlin, among others.
