Adi Ad / Tamar Hecht, Shir Cohen, Noa Mor, Hali Yuzbich

Forever and Ever, curated by Avshalom Suleiman, presents the work of four young women artists who have established their presence on the local scene over the past four years. Heli Yuzbits’, Shir Cohen, Tamar Hecht, and Noa Mor share a common frequency. Each embodies a renewed commitment to the sculptural discipline and process-based lexicon that characterized 1960s American Minimalism (which was predominantly a male phenomenon) and international and Israeli Post-Minimalism from the 1970s onward.

Each confronts, in different ways, sculptural questions of language, appearance, presence, space, and repetition.

The exhibition proposes viewing these four artists as a trend in contemporary Israeli art, one that combines a minimalist formal language with local sensibilities toward Israeli space.

Noa Mor’s works have an industrial appearance and a degree of finish that ranges from polished to makeshift. The sculptures she presents in the exhibition are creatures made of steel cables and plaster casts. The pair of prints, At the Edge of the City There Is a Desert Set, were printed using soil the artist collected from different places throughout the country, each of which was home to her family during a different period.

Shir Cohen’s works begin with an idea and an impulse to connect materials and disrupt the utilitarian function of architectural components and household objects. The relationship between rectilinear geometry and quasi-biological textures creates the sculptures’ inner tension. Cohen presents wall works made of fluorescent purple Plexiglas, an aluminum shelf bearing a dense graphite drawing, and an eye stone resting on a fake air mattress.

Tamar Hecht’s textile works are made using traditional quilting techniques, from button-down shirts sold in the area between Herzl Street and Salame Street in southern Tel Aviv. Alongside their formal precision, they conceal a socioeconomic question: What do handmade works look like in a culture of “low-tech” office jobs?

Mad Man—the large wall rug Hecht created for the exhibition—is made from dismantled logos of global corporate companies, a kind of maximalist gesture that could be called “corporate abstraction.”

Heli Yuzbits’ works alone and carefully produces the materials for her work. The cube sculpture she presents was rebuilt from modular units of white concrete. The work creates a simple geometric volume and a highly concentrated mass. Alongside it are more “organic” sculptures created by casting concrete into pits dug in the ground. Extracting the concrete and setting it upright on the gallery floor recalls the removal of a severed body from a subterranean enclosure, 2039/2040—Ground.