Gallery Benyamini Opens Its Decade Anniversary Year with a Flash Exhibition Introducing Six New Members

The Benyamini Artists Group chooses to expand itself in motion, like a pack of “Wild Beasts,” echoing the title of the gallery’s inaugural exhibition curated by Gilad Melzer in May 2011. Naturally, this new members’ exhibition resonates with Melzer’s text from that founding show: "Perhaps because, in this murky, violent, and raw moment and place, this is what emerges..."

The New Members:

Eti Levi – MFA, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design
"The core of my practice begins with a 'conversation' with the paper, exploring an alternative order of representations, signs, and meanings. I investigate, reveal, and engage with the dual and ambivalent status of text and script: conventional, charged symbols that carry cultural, personal, and functional meaning in a specific time and place, yet simultaneously possess a material, concrete, and opaque existence. The script 'melts' into stains, while stains take on the appearance of script."

Boaz Torpestein – MFA, Central Saint Martins, London
"As the world evolves technologically, so does the act of drawing. The more complex, overloaded, fast, and sharp the world becomes, the more the simplicity of drawing gains strength. The quiet inherent in a simple drawing contrasts with the surrounding chaos. Drawing has no pretense of objectivity—quite the opposite. It embodies perfect subjectivity. It plays, examines with ease, and does not commit to a single truth or statement."

Daniel Manu-Bella – Multidisciplinary Art Graduate, Shenkar
"I explore self-identity and social identity through material and practices of reuse and collage. My creative process begins with photography and undergoes deconstruction and reconstruction through various digital and analog techniques—sculpture, drawing, printmaking, writing, sewing, ready-made, and more—until the final sculpture or installation emerges."

Tal Hafner – Photography Graduate, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design & Parsons School of Design, New York
"My work addresses the displacement of critical elements in our lives—the body, the sea, and the plant world—offering alternative ways of engaging with them. The bodies are allowed to grow, flow, float, or sink into their new environments, challenging physical, biological, social, and political norms while examining the intersection between private and public spaces."

Adi Hoffman – Graduate of Holon Institute of Technology & San Francisco Studio School
"I merge contrasting external landscapes—nature with urban construction sites. My works strive to convey expressive intensity while depicting places of uncertainty. They present an abstract interpretation of observation, blended with imagination, structural investigation, and abstraction of accumulating elements that construct fictional spaces and scenarios."

Irit Barel-Basan – Art Graduate, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design
"I examine the relationship between form and its essence. Can we separate the appearance of a thing from the thing itself? This question also applies to beauty—the biological, evolutionary drive of living beings to project fitness and strength. My works disrupt beauty's conventional manifestations, pushing them to extremes and transforming them into grotesque forms." 

* Auto translation