Recipient of the 2024 Shoshana Ish Shalom Awards
The 2024 Shoshana Ish Shalom Art Award—Committee’s Comments:
Yael Boverman-Attas depicts interior spaces with great restraint, manifested in the black and white coloration, the measured work, and the decision to describe the buildings unpopulated and anonymous for the most part. The objects and people, too, are depicted from a distance, carefully, with forethought. The same approach is maintained in the relatively rare colorful descriptions, which are likewise minimalistic. The moderate pace was recently interrupted by imaginary landscapes painted during the current Gaza war; turbulent works in which the orderly lines give way to wild brush strokes, but the time has yet to come to discuss them. Often delving into her family history, Boverman-Attas’s works surrender frozen time. She presents the stories with few, symbolic means, distilling them into hints. These stories encapsulate the essence of an Israeli childhood in an old Jerusalem neighborhood. They conceal a tense awareness of a silent and pulsating World War II heritage. The restrained depiction enhances the tension, allowing the viewer to become acquainted with the original story through the title or the accompanying text, and at the same time entertain personal thoughts and develop private narratives. Even when they portray domestic spaces, the works convey alienation and distance. Despite the scarce details, one discerns the artist’s probing eye, striving to decipher and perpetuate both the visible and the invisible.
For all these, the committee has found Yael Boverman-Attas worthy and deserving of the 2024 Shoshana Ish Shalom Art Award.
Award committee:
Ronit Sorek, Curator, Prints and Drawings, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Yonatan Ron, representative of the Jerusalem Artists’ House
Moriah Nirel, representative of the Ish Shalom family
Red Chair | 2022, oil on canvas, 40x50cm (photo: Muki Schwartz)
Selected artist of the London Art Biennale 2023
July 26-30, 2023
The London Art Biennale is an award-winning museum-level exhibition, curated by the Confederation of Art Critics, the Chianciano Art Museum and Gagliardi Gallery. The show is not theme based thus allows for all artistic movements to be presented.
The sixth London Art Biennale 2023 will showcase 400 artists from 80 countries. The Biennale is a significant event in the world of contemporary art, a wide variety of artists, art lovers and collectors. An opening event will be held on July 26 for invitees, art collectors, art professionals, selected artists and their guests and will be open to the public from July 27th to 30th at the iconic Chelsea Old Town Hall.
The philosopherII | 2022. Oil on canvas 93x137 cm (photo: Muki Schwartz)
New Members, Jerusalem Artist's House
curator: Meidad Eliyahu
September 2nd - December 2nd, 2023
As part of a long-standing tradition, the Artists’ House continues to welcome new members to the Jerusalem Artists Association every year, opening the annual exhibition season with a display of their works. This year, three new members have joined the association: Sara Benninga, Yael Boverman-Attas, and Noga Greenberg.
In the series Hallway, Yael Boverman-Attas charges her works with the tension between spatial illusion and the drawing-material act. Inspired by her childhood home in Jerusalem, the artist processes memories and impressions, distant and recent, to reconstruct the charged space. She elaborates, erases, and organizes the spaces of the kitchen, living room, and stairwell. Relying on a fixed architectural structure, the acts of marking, imprinting, and color application are used to create different perspectives, at times—antithetical versions of the same spaces. The shadowing and coloration in the paintings do not correspond with natural logic, indicating an internal painterly order; a firm presence of organization, harmony, and depth.
“Hallway” | 2023. Gesso, charcoal, graphite and pastel on canvas, 180x240 cm. (Photo: Muki Schwartz)