Shahar Yahalom

The work of Shahar Yahalom deals with fundamental principles of art: image, material, shape, color, size and their expressions in various media such as sculpture, drawing, print, photography, video, and sound. Yahalom uses the most easily accessible, and often simple, materials. Consequently, objects from the studio often coexist with elements from one’s personal, everyday life; yet, they always undergo a slight adaptation. The results are elaborate, detailed, and at times willfully spectacular – in a way that can connote late Romanticism as much as it may Arte Povera. These objects take the viewer’s consciousness to faraway places filled with dream-like, fantastic, and romantic experiences.

Yahalom hones the traits of her works by seaming together sculpture and drawing, by drawing closer to the monochromatic color range of blacks and whites, and through her use of gothic, landscape, and aquatic images. The sculptural environments she creates can be seen as an experience of becoming: objects and processes explored and displayed as a dynamic, fluctuating state, rather than static and unequivocal. This holds true both if one thinks of the aesthetic economy of the work, and of its set up.

In her recent exhibition Shahar Yahalom presented painted plaster sculptures and drawings. The underlying principle of the drawing was a work based on memory while avoiding looking at the painted objects, which gave the painterly scene an archetypical feel. The sculptures – a group of tombstones, on which drawings were imprinted – formed a mysterious environment, which together with the drawings, stressed the enigmatic aspect of the installation.

The work of Shahar Yahalom has been displayed in solo exhibitions, including: The City Gate, Herzliya Biennale in 2009 and The Raspberry Land, Shortlist Exhibition, Israeli Art Prize 2011, Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation, Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Her works were also featured in group exhibitions, including at the Art Museum, Beijing; Columbia MFA graduates show, New York; Neiman Gallery, New York; Marco Museum, Rome; Aran Cravey Gallery, Los Angeles; The University Gallery, Tel Aviv University; The Michael Adler Collection and Israeli Post-Minimalism in the 70s and in Contemporary Art, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art; and ART TLV 2009, Tel Aviv.

Shahar Yahalom has received numerous awards, including the America Israel Cultural Foundation scholarship in 2006-07.