The Finger // RawArt Gallery & Raster Gallery / Fresh Paint 9 / Project
"The Finger" is a special project that brings together the works of four artists – Zbigniew Libera and Przemek Matecki, represented by Raster Gallery, Warsaw, and Yaron Attar and Hadas Satt, represented by RawArt Gallery, Tel Aviv - and is curated by the respective gallery curators. Corporal, humorous and defiant, the exhibition includes new works by the four artists, ranging from painting and photography to sculpture and performance.
Zbigniew Libera presents a new ongoing photo series that he has been working on, aiming to confront the aggression of the current socio-political climate. In these violent scenes, the artist is always present. A previous series of staged photographs by Libera, consisting of black and white images, is also shown here, accompanied by a press release describing an imagined trial, in which all major neoliberal politicians, economists, and bankers are sentenced, and found guilty of having inflicted the global economic crisis.
Yaron Attar presents a new sculpture, activated by an anonymous caretaker throughout the show. It is a human figure made out of white clay, just under life size, laying down and exhaling steam. Attar's video work "Remurder," shot in Poland in 2014, features the confessions of four actors who play murderous characters in European theater or film. A third video, which was inspired by a visit to Istanbul's Hagia Sophia, features an array of burning candles over a group of still turtles.
Hadas Satt's "Four Finger Formation" is a new photo installation that follows a four-aircraft flight formation used by fighter planes. The photos arranged in this harmonious but deadly constellation take us back to an era of pre-reflex camera, referencing the all too familiar accidents found in our family albums - human fingers jutting into the perfect frames of vacation photos and childhood achievements. In Satt's work, the finger is in the photo (intruding on serene animal life) and is also the photo itself. A second photo constellation is "Boardwalk," a triptych of sunset photographs, duplicated and mirrored to become menacing Rorschach-like configurations.
Finally, Przemek Matecki's pocket-size collage paintings take as their point of departure the literal and metaphorical excrements of contemporary visual and material culture. Deploying a witty painterly camouflage over quotations, stencils, and torn-out press photos, his works flirt with pornography and politics, only to win (albeit in a somewhat unclear way) the forces of evil over to his side. Matecki brings a particular, non-academic sensitivity to the painterly image and, at the same time, a counter-cultural energy that lets the paintings gain a life of their own, here and now.
Supported by:






