Biography

I was born in Yehud in 1970, the eldest of four children, to Rachel Keller (born in Bialystok, Poland, to Holocaust survivors) and Menashe Harari (born in Tel Aviv to parents who hailed from Yemen). I attended the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts, Givatayim, and following compulsory military service, studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, in the department of Theater and Set Design at Tel Aviv University, and at the Midrasha School of Art, Beit Berl Academic College.
From a very early age, painting has furnished my body with a lively arena, tied with the realms of life, passion and beauty, but at the same time—with loci of muteness and detachment.
The process leading from the series Vertigo Inbox (1) (Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2008) to my one-person exhibition, "A Witch who Ran Out of Horses" (Inga Gallery, Tel Aviv, 2012) is underlain by a dynamic of internal evolution and painterly development characteristic of my oeuvre in recent years. "Vertigo" is a series in which a radical situation forms a point of departure for the painting, and at the same time—a trigger for exploring the possibility of a radical reversal of fundamental orders, and the resulting shock. Vertigo #1 features a torn structure hanging by a thread, where a red dot indicates "no entry." As in all my works, here too, the psychological dimension of the private situation projects, naturally as it were, on a much broader, collective-environmental context.
The later paintings (from 2011) are based on images extracted from press photographs, alluding to a violent concrete political situation of evacuation (Amona). In reflexive-painterly terms, I throw myself into the fight, challenging realism, which marks an affinity with reality, and confronting the barrier between realism and abstract. Psychologically speaking, the transition from Vertigo to the 2011 paintings is an inward-oriented process intended to destroy systems, a radical-fruitful destruction. It is a confrontation of intrinsic thinking modes, behavioral patterns, and concepts of identity. Whereas in Vertigo #1, all that remained behind the feeling of threat was human need in the most basic sense of survival, the struggle in the later series echoes and reflects a turn which opens the door toward observing power relations in the world and in human relationships.
I relate to the process whereby a transformation or transition occurs from the violent-ridden place to loci of life, intimacy, delicate human and natural systems.

Neta Harari

 

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