Neta Bachrach and Michal Tamir come together as a pair in the exhibition Foreign

Body for an encounter with the axis of the universe – a liminal dialogue between

manifest and concealed, life and death. Through ancient mythologies and a renewed

meeting with nature and the body, the artists weave personal, contemporary

autobiographies; while decomposing and recomposing fears and hopes, new and old

artworks.The psychiatrist and neurologist Ernst Jentsch conceived the term uncanny

to describe the sense of terror experienced when we confront something we cannot

explain due to a lack of experience or the limitations of our senses. Jentsch attributed

the term to states of intellectual uncertainty, moments when the mind is incapable of

finding logic in a particular occurrence. Sigmund Freud, the founder of

psychoanalysis, adopted the term and expanded it beyond the intellect to the spheres

of culture, literature, and the human psyche. Not all new things are necessarily

unpleasant, Freud asserted. For something to be that way, another element is needed:

familiarity. A sense of discomfort arises when we are faced with something that

seems familiar to us yet turns out to be foreign.

The tension between macro and micro when encountering the works exhibited by

Bachrach and Tamir elicits a similar contrast between the familiar and the revealed

and new. The magnified surrealistic figures, the wild nature extending in all directions,

the vivid and saturated colors — from a distance they all seem to fill the gallery space

with a sense of vitality and pomposity. Yet one step further in the intimate encounter

with each painting and sculpture reveals that at the same time, the familiar is an

illusion. The sensory experience transforms in the face of the size and overflowing

materiality. Souls reveal themselves from beneath the layers of paint and the weight

of the substrate.

Stories from mythology, which address the blurring between human and nature, serve

as the basis for Neta Bachrach’s paintings and sculptures. Through transformation

into a different material form, in the image of nature, the figures in the stories are

awarded new lives. Through the story of Clytie, the water nymph the deities

transformed into a sunflower in tribute to her unrequited love for the sun deity Helios,

Bachrach contemplates the eternal cycle between disintegration and rebirth.

In a moment taken almost from a theatrical scene, Michal Tamir’s family – siblings

and children – gathers at noon around the mother’s bed for a final farewell. These

intimate moments are the point of departure for a series of portraits at the deathbed.

Tamir commemorates this point of passage and examines the perspective of the

participants in this encounter with death, as well as acceptance and release from the

body.

Together, Bachrach and Tamir choose to linger at the threshold, in places that seem

familiar and those that are not. The sense of unsettling change seems to have pierced

the walls of their studios over the past two years, threatening the accepted distinction

between familiar and unfamiliar. In a joint decision, they opt to put out feelers and

remove the heavy screen placed between the two spaces, to bravely look behind the

scenes. They search out reason and familiarity, even in the foreign body placed before

them, in the new nature that is budding. They call into question preferences between

front and back, cast doubt on the classification between good and bad, and anchor

the elusive moment of passage. They expose for themselves, and therefore also for

us, a rare moment of revelation.

Translated from Hebrew by Emily Cooper