Shirly Bar Amotz / Happy Days
This body of work, recently exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum in Israel, is the result of Bar-Amotz’ winning of the prestigious 2012 Andrea M. Bronfman Prize for the Arts.
In this exhibition, Bar-Amotz has created dramatic “landscapes” crowded with details that tell their stories through flashes of fairy tales and a “carnival” sense of celebration. Using rich animal imagery and a vibrant palette, Bar-Amotz builds miniature “sculptures” that freeze a moment in time and evoke the artist’s recollections of a world long ago and far away. Explaining her snapshots of fantasy, Bar-Amotz states:
“These are animals from ‘there’ and not ‘here’: a swan, rabbit, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, a camel that turns into a deer, a tiger, the king of the jungle from European fairy tales which arrived here and became something new: something local, Israeli, with a longing for European fantasy, for memory.”
In creating Happy Days, Bar-Amotz combines both cheap, readymade materials with precious metals and stones – a reference to the material European culture that Israeli society redefined in an attempt to create a new culture.
About Shirly Bar-Amotz
Shirly Bar-Amotz was born and raised on Kibbutz Ma’abarot – the granddaughter of Zionist pioneers of Eastern European descent. She received both her BFA and MFA degrees from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem where she currently teaches. As the recipient of the 2012 Andrea M. BronfmanPrize for the Arts, Bar-Amotz received an exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, an accompanying catalogue and two works purchased for the collections of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
Shirly Bar-Amotz has had her work exhibited in numerous international exhibitions including Israel, The Netherlands, Great Britain and the United States.
Bar-Amotz attributes much of her success to the support of AIDA (Association of Israel’s Decorative Arts) whose mission it is to promote the development of contemporary decorative artists from Israel by connecting them to a wide international audience.
Exhibition: Feb. 13 – March 11, 2013
Artist Reception: Sat. Feb. 16, 2013 7-9 pm.
Join us to hear Shirly Bar-Amotz speak about the exhibition:
At the 92nd St. Y – Wed. Feb 13, 2013 7 pm.
At Brooklyn Metal Works – Sunday, Feb. 17, 2013 6 pm.