Maayan Shahar
BFA and MFA graduate from Bezalel. Had a solo exhibition at Gallery Be'eri and participated in group exhibitions at Eretz Israel Museum, Artspace Tel-Aviv, Beit Hansen, The Negev Museum of Art and many more. She is the recipient of Rabinovich Foundation awards, the “Boras” grant for creative encouragement, the Ruach Hadasha scholarship and many excellence awards. Shahar’s work includes sculpture, installation and drawing, and she searches for mundane objects and banal moments whose function can be altered or which she can disrupt and transpose to new spaces. Her sculptures are influenced by her immediate surroundings and are characterized by a multiplicity of units that are joint to create one mass using various techniques. She constructs most of them from an amalgamation of found objects from the urban expanse such as tires, buckets and fishing buoys, which are sometimes combined with organic materials which she collects - branches, dry bushes and rocks. Most of these sculptural objects function as living displays, slightly absurd and occasionally comic. Some of them rotate on their axis aimlessly, some embody an unfulfilled potential of movement and others remain completely still. They are a response to states of repetition, absurdity and uncanniness. The repetitive, mechanical motion reappears often in Shahar’s work, and through it she explores the possibility of transgressing linearity and moving in circles that may not lead anywhere. Concurrently with her sculptural work, the drawings Shachar exhibits are likewise characterized by multiple units which, put together, reveal the entire image. These drawings form a space in which imaginary encounters between figures and volumes take place, charging and disrupting the sculptural act.
