The exhibition Extended Mindsets brings together instructors at Hacubia Art School and graduates from different classes, and is concerned with intuition and artistic actions that emphasize duration and development in the creative process.

The artist may not immediately understand every decision made during the studio work process. The choice of a particular color or the preference for one form over another does not necessarily carry a clear meaning or weighty conceptual insight. Sometimes, the choice is motivated by a deep impulse, a muffled call urging the hand to press harder or more gently against the paper or canvas. Even if the hidden, implicit intentions underlying such actions may become apparent only years later, or never become explicit, the creative flow continues unimpeded. It seems that intuition relies largely on continuity, an evolving artistic process continuously seeking to reveal additional layers of the artist’s credo.

The title of the exhibition was inspired by the educational approach called “growth mindset,” formulated by the psychology researcher Carol Dweck. This approach represents the idea that effort and focused consciousness coaching can enable us to achieve anything. From this perspective, challenges are a necessary part of the learning process, mistakes are positive, and skills are acquired through dedication to repetitive actions.*

The works in the exhibition are composed of material and conceptual transformations, which raise questions such as the role of time in creative development and the contribution of intuition to art-making. In Fontanelle (Soft Spot), Shani Katz follows her son’s growth from birth to his future mature self; in Landescape , she explores deception and nostalgia through photographic manipulations of computer parts. Yonatan Ullman uses a felt-tipped marker and blue light to reconstruct a portrait of his father as a nine-year-old boy, painted by the artist Ruth Bamberger, thus infusing the intergenerational connection with new meaning. This past August, Hacubia Gallery featured a site-specific installation by Tal Nir, concerned with delimiting and spatially abstracting the gallery space. Nir’s photographs, which are included in the current exhibition, add another layer to this action. Helen Borowski explores the elusive nature of time and the decisive role of the gaze in the artwork, while a pervasive sense of danger surrounds the three watchtowers in her paintings. In the video work Home, Miryam Adler examines her connection to the objects belonging to the house where she spent her adolescence, in an attempt to fill the space created by her mother’s death.

In two works featured in the exhibition, Eden Bannet creates a sensuous, hybrid assemblage of objects, raw materials, and fragments of everyday items, which sheds light on the life cycle of materials. As attested to by their title, Shai Yehezkelli’s “palette paintings” were born of paint remaining on the palette from larger paintings. The works are characterized by an unbridled and intuitive visual vocabulary that alludes to local painting traditions. Ruth Magal lightly applied touches of coal and graphite on glassine paper in an attempt to capture ephemerality and transience in her dark images of nature. Alex Kremer’s expressive gestures are evident in his series of etchings, in which each line seems to catapult the represented figures into life. Using carpenter’s glue, Irit Makov transforms the floor in her studio into a loose, milky, skin-like fabric.
Finally, Pnina Shalvi presents different stages in the evolution of a painting, contrasting color and transparency, image and background, form and matter.
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Curator: Hadassa Cohen
Participants: Miryam Adler, Eden Bannet, Helen Borowski, Irit Makov, Shani Katz, Alex Kremer, Ruth Magal, Tal Nir, Pnina Shalvi, Yonatan Ullman and Shai Yehezkelli

*Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House, 2006