Shirly Bar-Amotz: Happy Days

Artist list

Shirly Bar-Amotz

This body of work, recently exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum in Israel, is the result of Bar-Amotz' winning of the prestigious 2012 Andrea M. Bronfman Prize for the Arts. In this exhibition, Bar-Amotz has created dramatic "landscapes" crowded with details that tell their stories through flashes of fairy tales and a "carnival" sense of celebration. Using rich animal imagery and a vibrant palette, Bar-Amotz builds miniature "sculptures" that freeze a moment in time and evoke the artist's recollections of a world long ago and far away. Explaining her snapshots of fantasy, Bar-Amotz states:

"These are animals from 'there' and not 'here': a swan, rabbit, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, a camel that turns into a deer, a tiger, the king of the jungle from European fairy tales which arrived here and became something new: something local, Israeli, with a longing for European fantasy, for memory."

In creating Happy Days, Bar-Amotz combines both cheap, readymade materials with precious metals and stones - a reference to the material European culture that Israeli society redefined in an attempt to create a new culture.