“PLANTED” Series - ****a short text about the specific work will follow****
Inbar Hasson’s work meets the viewer in a zone of discomfort, a kind of twilight zone between reality and imagination. Her body of work consists mainly of large-scale paintings which are made in mixed media using oil paints, collage and acrylic.
The common denominator of this body of work is the artist’s choice to reuse old paintings - portraits, landscape and still-lives, around which she tailors a plot that is completely new to the creation of the early painting. The portraits are of real people that the artist painted from observation but the whole scene in which she plants the portraits is invented, fabricated. The characters are inserted into a story that is not theirs, moving between different possibilities of reality. The way in which the ready-made portrait receives its new ‘body’ dictates a separate scene that brings the viewer to another story.
The status of women and their place in society is one of the subjects that preoccupies the artist; it is reflected in many of the works, a bride lying in the snow and waving her veil like a surrender, a woman about to jump out of a window while the man in the room seems alienated, in an act that combines criticism of the conservative and discriminatory society that has been ruled too long by men the artist plants her portraits in the figures of business women who seem strong but at a second glance their strength seems forced.
The connection of different elements, which do not naturally fit into one another naturally and routinely, gives rise to paintings that contain much of the secret and the riddle, and often a sense of being strangely familiar and threatening, in the sense of Freud’s Unheimlich concept, making it difficult to interpret the situation as good or bad, pleasing or displeasing. The situations we apparently recognize seem to be disturbingly alienated.
We are exposed to situations we are not accustomed to; we know of their existence, but they usually occur behind a screen or in a backroom, and our knowledge of their nature is second- or third-hand knowledge. The works expose intimate and hence fragile elements of the lives of the characters, moments of reflection and loneliness. We identify them with the dark realm, between the allowed and the forbidden, the normative and the non-normative.
Often staged in somewhat fantastic interiors, with an occasional outwards glimpse to further natural or urban landscapes, Inbar Hasson’s imagery creates for her viewers a space to dwell, to look inwards, to conjure one’s own inner world.
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Education from ”planted” series
a strong woman holds a stick in her hand, and next to her sits a young woman with a book in her lap. An Israeli eye will identify the books on the shelves as religious books (solid binding colors and gold decorations), and accordingly the situation will be identified as an act of education or punishment for deviation from the norms in a religious society. A more universal view might place the scene in a conservative European home a hundred years ago or more. Either way, the situation is difficult and filled with tension, and the figures represent opposite positions of power, as happens quite a bit in the body of works presented here.
Inbar Hasson, short bio
With a background in interior design and Middle-Eastern studies, multi-disciplinary artist Inbar Hasson has lived and worked in the Netherlands since 2011. As a graduate of the Wackers Academy of Arts in Amsterdam, Hasson devoted herself to large-scale painting and collage, in which she seeks a tension between an appealing visual storytelling and a sense of discomfort and disorientation. Both confronting and seducing, she demands from the viewer an active gaze, rewarded with an emotional impact. Recently, Hasson has been developing a series of new projects under the title Background Check, where she focuses on notions of social inequality
Hasson currently exhibiting in Arte Laguna prize Venice, in the past in she exhibited in the Netherlands, New York and Israel in both solo and group shows
Inbar Hasson- artist statements- (short)
I am disturbed and concerned by the general numbness in our society, and through art I seek to punch this drowsiness that we can’t afford.
I believe that a work of art first and foremost evokes in us a physical sensation. A feeling which we later label with names.
When creating I think about the physical experience and body sensation I would like the work to evoke. The experiences may be the result of discomfort, confusion or disorientation. Is the image funny or grotesque? Is it suppressed rage or apathie? This zone of “in-betweenness” is my playground.