Suddenly, There’s a Figure

Artists: Galia Uri, Yael Honig, Ran Harari, Sharon Livne, Moshe Mirsky, Shira Kamrad, Yuval Shaul
Curator: Dan Orimian

The starting point for the exhibition at Hacubia is a completed oeuvre by the late forgotten local artist Ran Harari (1944–2020) and Sharon Livne’s documentary film about him: Suddenly, There’s a Figure (2014). Following the encounter with Harari’s persona, the exhibition curator Dan Orimian embarks on a journey of artistic inquiry and a search for contexts through the works of five contemporary artists. The exhibition expands into an examination of the act of creation itself, unfolding as a system of responses, reformations and reverberations. 

Harari lived and worked in the margins. He wandered between rooms rented in kibbutzim and devoted his days to creating under harsh and ascetic conditions. The thousands of works he left at his death – an archive of envelopes containing multiple series of works on Xerox sheets and rolls of industrial paper with fleeting gestures of color – formulate a unique language: thin, temporary, and stubborn painting that operates from a place of shortage but refuses to be limited by it. In his works, landscapes of paths and fields, kibbutz corners, and shadows of passing figures dissolve into patches and forms. He worked small but dreamed big, and the painting seems like a movie screen. 

Three of the exhibiting artists knew Harari in his lifetime, recognized beneath his sharpened cynicism a great sensitivity and a need for closeness, helped him, and became his friends. Exhibited alongside them are two younger-generation female artists, who did not know Harari, but thin threads stretch between their works and his. 

The exhibition focuses on the artist’s condition as someone who operates in a middle ground – aspiring for recognition, belonging, and framework, but driven by an impulse to challenge, deviate, and distance. It is a tense space where creation forms between grasping and collapsing, and spills from the concrete into the undefined.