Hagit Barkai: "Resistance" opening reception Saturday June 4, 6 to 9 PM     exhibition runs through June 25, 2011 please note: new gallery hours Wed. Thurs, Fri. & Sat. Noon to 6 PM Nau-haus Art, 223 E. 11th St. Houston TX, 77008 catalog available here

   We find Hagit Barkai and the evidence of her journey nearer the beginning than the end, but can still see an evolution from her earlier body of work.

     She says about the paintings in the series “Every Body Knows” completed in  2009 " the paintings question the borders between victim hood and victimizing. While growing up in the ideological atmosphere of a Jewish Settlement Bet El in the West Bank, I was at the center of an increasingly hostile moral and political quarrel, which resulted in extremely defensive attitudes. Part of my education included a rewrite of events and ways of thinking that did not sustain the religious and national convictions ....  while at the same time assuming to hold ideals such as liberalism, democracy and basic human rights.  The problems at the center of this work revolve around ethical demands of self discrimination and a nostalgic longing for self justification. "
 
 

Barkai's works from this period, on display for her exhibition a Nau-haus, are complete and masterful paintings, full of expression and allegory. They are almost narrative, and perhaps originate more from remembered experience, even a heritage, than a story unfolding in the moment. Her works become less narrative, and less "complete" as the time to the present grows shorter. Works from the "Cross" and "Indifference" series start to pull apart and fragment as if the story is still unfolding or there is no narrative at all. The need to complete every detail diminishes leaving only the truth as an observed fact now understood in the eyes of the artist.

   Hagit says about the "Cross" paintings, " I try to create a way to see threats and potentials as similar entities. By using images of babies moments after birth, dying people in hospitals, and babies with deformities or trauma to the face, I construct a space that is inhabitant by lives that are not fully there anymore, lives that are not fully there yet and lives that are there but for one reason or another are not considered to be there."  Regarding the “In Difference" works the artist says " I collaborate with couples to explore the paradoxical fluctuation between wanting to be part of something and wanting to be separate, longing to be same and longing to be different." Hagit Barkai's works from both of these later series are much less a narrative, and much more of a perception about our experience. They reach no conclusion and are often left in an unfinished state, while still whole in their intention.
   I first wrestled with the elegance and power of " incomplete ideas"  while preparing an exhibition for a young artist several years ago at Nau-haus. Aware that my doors of perception were being inched open by the artist and his work, and curious about my fascination for the lack of specificity in subject and seemingly unfinished objects he was presenting me with, I still had to agree with with the artist that what was necessary to qualify in every way as works of art  ready to hang in my gallery were indeed met. After all, my favorite portrait, and the most famous portrait in all of Americana is Gilbert Stuart's unfinished portrait of George Washington. It's a great work of art as it is and "unfinished." The hopes of a young nation yet to unfold. The canvas would be a lesser work if it had been completed and we could count all the buttons on George's snappy frock instead of wondering a little about the fate of nations and perhaps the great men that lead the way.  Not many of my collectors got what my artist was doing that month, and to be honest I only had a feeling at the time about the validity of the work, while I had no doubt about the artist's sincerity.
 

  While I lived with the work in my gallery something interesting happened. I found that when I left behind the preconceived and expected notions of covering the entire canvas with paint, of carving every last toe, of specifying every last idea in a work of art, and holding the artists as the complete and sole witness of the truth about their work, I was pulled into an interaction with the art much like a visual devise artists might employ to pull the viewer into the scene of a painting. (Think of the Renaissance master and a figure beckoning from edge of the image frame calling the viewer to join in.) I became part of the dialogue as well as a witness to the artists intent, while re-supposing the works completion over and over again. Much like my first blush with "outsider art" I had to unlearn my expectations, feel it first and withhold judgment until I had spent enough time with the art to let my mind catch up to my heart.
 

I don't expect very many patrons to get all of what Hagit Barkai is doing in her exhibition "Resistance" at Nau-haus this June, or for that matter want to take in home. The earlier works Barkai presents are powerful and deftly executed in an almost Old World aesthetic, while confronting her audience with some food for thought about the politics unfolding in Mideast and elsewhere. Cruelty is lurking in the shadows of all men in all times. Her most recent works will put the collector ill at ease if for no other reason than the artists unwillingness to lay down anything but context and the perceived moment while discarding all but the essential trompe l'oeil and atmosphere she seems to be able to call on at will. Why would the artist paint such things? Why dose she abandon the visual illusions we find so amazing? Why would we take that work home and want to live with it?

    While Barkai's work is truthful and smart, and she reminds us that we are not always pretty but sometimes just vulnerable, unaware and exposed. " .... I construct a space that is inhabitant by lives that are not fully there anymore, lives that are not fully there yet, and lives that are there but for one reason or another are not considered to be there."  We need smart artists to challenge our preconceptions so that we might overcome the prejudice of our perspective and allow ourselves the happiness that comes from a wider view.  Hagit Barkai demonstrates all the skill and desire she needs to share her vision, and the intelligence, honesty and heart to see it all.
                                                                                                                         DMA - Nau-haus 2011
 

The Art of Hagit Barkai: Between the Abject and the Sublime, by Surpik Angelini :

Israel was the birthplace and  cultural crucible where Hagit Barkai witnessed  meaningful battles waged in the name of selfhood, as well as deaf and blind walls erected to keep the Other out. A growing rift  between the culture of the Diaspora and the culture of the Settlers happening while Hagit was growing up, seared her psyche with a thirst  for truth. While in college, she turned first to philosophy in search for answers. But, writing, she discovered, favors  an omniscent  gaze that tends to silence the Other.  Art, instead opened  doors to finding an ethical balance in her relationship with the world. Thus, since the year 2000 Hagit Barkai paints

The art of Hagit Barkai centers on  mysterious and why not? mystical processes  that underlie personhood: she reveals to us glimpses into other beings, instances when their  becoming drifts to the surface. It is no surprise that Hagit chooses to paint the human body, grounded in the rigorous tradition of Western figuratve painting. Yet, in her work, there is a deliberate departure from Modern canons. Her point of view and her creative process are philosophically rooted in what Heidegger termed "Dassein" or  being in the world. Since Dassein, requires authenticity according to the philosopher as well as " a kind of situadedness that involves both the discursive meanings of a cultural field of significance and the corporeal experiences of an embodied subject", (pp.9, Irigaray and Deleuze; experiments in visceral philosophy, Tamsin Lorraine) Hagit, in her own search for authenticity, explores both the sensual and cultural situatedness of her "self" and her subject. In “Home More And Less: Aisen and Tyson” from 2009. we find  a young couple dressed in costumes that bring out their cultural differences as well as their “gendered” attitudes. The young woman is posed a couple of steps behind the young man, as if  in a submissive mode.  She is sheathed
in a white tunic, with a headdress that evokes an Andean woman or a "cholita's" garb.  He appears assertively dressed in a contemporary, flaming red suit, seeming to complacently exert dominance in the scene. Yet, in this provocative “mise en scene”, where the subjects deliberately perform their parts, the artist captures that instant when the masks drop and an inner spark illuminates the uniqueness and depth of each player. To the viewer, it is evident that an exchange took place  between the artist and the couple:  this particular and unexpected instance of self awareness is a shared one. Here, in this in-between space, the space of becoming is where the artist finds the fertile ground for meaningful exchanges between subjectivities. Selfhood exudes from human exchange, not alone, not from the outside, nor from the inside alone, but from a meaningful dialogue. As the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray states it " a sexual ethics would treat the body's contact not
as a corpse but as something living : angels maintain the body's contact with the divine by mediating between the mortal body and its infinite valiable contact with the sensuous world" (pp.40, Irigaray and Deleuze).

Surpik Angelini is an artist, critic, independent curator and director of the Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology in Houston, Texas.
 

Artist Statement:
Seeing the body as the prime location in which rights are given and removed and through which stories take place and are understood, my paintings focus on demands addressed to the body in public and private spaces. I am interested in the ways that images of the body function as visual signs for social and self employed norm. In particular, in what happens when images of the body function as signs that are misread, impossible to read, or cease to carry meaning at all.  I look at anxieties concerning the visibility of the body, and on how they influence giving an account of myself, others, and social currents around me.  Looking at bodies in efforts to maintain respectability, in struggles to gain visibility and struggles to escape it, I ask what images of the body they attempt to deliver and avoid, and how successful they are. The process of painting is a correspondence between the possibilities I see and the possibilities that the paint presents.
As the surface fluctuates between acceptance and rejection of the image, the painting becomes a correspondance between ruptures in the performances that constitute my visual imagery and ruptures in the performative act of painting. In my paintings I am trying to make visible problems that are evasive and invisible to me. They oscillate between complimentary binaries such as  victimhood and victimizing, acceptance and resistance, estrangement and belonging, homeliness and exile, seeing and being seen, showing and hiding. The emotions that mark the subject matters I am interested in are shame, regret and denial. The experiences that motivate my work are inherited sins that center around bodies, starting from the personal sin of hating the body, through the gendered sin of accepting belittlement, limitations and indoctrinations, to the social legacy of victimhood of “our bodies”, the moral sin of oppression towards “no-bodies”, and ultimately to the sin of painting itself.
 

The series “Every Body Knows” questions the borders between victimhood and victimizing. Growing up in the ideological atmosphere in a Jewish Settlement Bet El in the West Bank, I was at the center of an increasingly hostile moral and political quarrel, which resulted in extremely defensive attitudes. Part of my education included a rewrite of events and ways of thinking that did not sustain the religious and national convictions while at the same time assuming to hold ideals such as liberalism, democracy and basic human rights.  The problems at the center of this work revolve around ethical demands of self discrimination and nostalgic longing for self justification. The series consists of paintings arranged by four “families” of characters: the Blindfold, the Vomiters, the Middays and the Waiters. The images of these characters steam from real events at the basis of the political atmosphere in Israel, such as unjustified detainments, public strip-searches, harassments, violence and tortures that are due to one’s identity. I see this work as creating a visual echo of public discourses that weave a camouflage around such events.

“Cross” is a series of portraits that confuses the borders between young and old, alive and dead, normality and monstrosity. In this series I try to create a way to see threats and potentials as similar entities. By using images of babies moments after birth, dying people in hospitals, and babies with deformities or trauma to the face, I construct a space that is inhabitant by lives that are not fully there anymore, lives that are not fully there yet and lives that are there but for one reason or another are not considered to be there.
In the series “In Difference” I collaborate with couples to explore the paradoxical fluctuation between wanting to be part of something and wanting to be separate, longing to be same and longing to be different. In this project, periodic interviews with different couples in a relationship result in performances that are documented and used as a base for paintings.
 
 

EDUCATION:
2008   Penn State University, State College PA USA, MFA, Painting and Drawing.
2004   Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem Israel, BA in Philosophy.
2002   Jerusalem Studio School, Israel, Master Class, Painting and Drawing.
2001   Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD USA, Summer Program.

UPCOMING:
Bender - Chashama Gallery New York New York. A group show on connection between spirituality, consumption and the body. details TBA

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS:
Integrazia.Group show curated by Moti Golan. Tel Aviv-Ayelet Hashachar Gallery. Kibutz Ayelet Hashachar, Israel. July 2010
The Seven At Canal. Group show curated by Armando Rodriguez. Canal Street Gallery. Houston TX, August 2010
Additional Support. Group show with Artists Jessica Jacobi and Kelley Divine, ARC Gallery, Houston Texas. May-June 2010
Texas National 2010, show curated by Judy Pfaff. The Cole Arts Center, Nacogdoches TX, April-June 2010
La lengua Muerta. In mini installation piece by Daniel Adame. La Botanika, Houston TX. April-June 2010
My Birthday. Group show curated by Aisen Chacin and Tyson Urich. 2005 Vermont, Houston Texas, spring 2010
MFANow: Identity, Self II. Curated by Judy Chicago. Praxis Gallery, NY, NY, 2009
Conceal Disclose. Two persons show, Art League of Houston, Houston TX, 2009
Hunting prize Show. Houston TX, winter 2009
Cooler than Usual, N Gallery, Houston TX, winter 2009
Golden Calf. Crane Arts, Philadelphia, PA, summer 2008
Pinky Swear. Fe Gallery, Pittsburgh PA, summer 2008
Every Body Knows. Solo show. Thesis exhibition, Zoller Gallery, State College PA, spring 2008
Research Exhibition. Penn State University, State College PA, winter 2008
Displacement. Chashama Gallery, New York NY, summer 2007
Research Exhibition (award). Penn State University State College PA, 2007
All These Little Defenses. Solo show. Liam Roberts Gallery, Sunbury PA, 2007
Big Ten Graduate Exhibition. Chicago, IL, Year long, 2006-2007 
Art of the State. State Museum, Harrisburg PA, 2006
Go figure. Isadore Gallery, Lancaster PA, 2006
Walnut Gallery Guest Exhibitor, Solo show, Gallery At Walnut Place. Harrisburg PA, 2006
Art of the State. State Museum, Harrisburg PA, 2005
To the Edge of the world. Susquehanna Art Museum, Doshi Gallery, Harrisburg. PA, 2005
77th annual Juried Exhibition, Art Association of Harrisburg, Harrisburg Pennsylvania, Summer 2005
Figuratively Speaking. juried exhibition (Award), Harrisburg Art Association, Harrisburg. PA, 2005

REVIEWS:
The Need For Additional Support., By Jenni  Rebecca Stephenson. Absolutely! In the loop Magazine. June 2010.
Conceal Disclose sets up unlikely dialogue, By Douglas Britt. Houston Chronicle. May 7 2009
Pledges and Politics. By Savannah Guz. Pittsburgh City Paper. July 17 2008
CAA names 2007 Fellows, CAA News. Volume 33 March 2008
The Human Landscape. By Mellissa Beattie-Moss. Research Penn State. Fall 2008
Art addresses personal identity. By Stechanie Goga. The Daily Collegian, February 27 2008
 
 
 

AWARDS / HONORS:
MFANow, The Next Generation of Painting International Competition, 2008
CAA Professional Development Fellowship Award, 2008
First place for the Visual Arts in Penn State University Research Exhibition, 2007
Represented Penn State University, Big Ten Graduate Exhibition, 2006-2007
Travel Grant to Israel, Penn State University, 2006
Graduate Teaching Assistantship, Penn State University, 2006-2008

COMMISSIONS:
Film and Video Department, Penn State University, State College PA 2008.
Alumni Association, Penn State University, State College PA, 2006

TEACHING  – College and University level:
Davidson College, Davidson NC, starting fall 2011
Houston Community College, Houston TX, fall 2009-Spring 2011.
Penn State University, State College PA, 2006-2008

TEACHING  – not for profit organizations:
Art League Houston, Houston TX, fall 2008–Spring 2011.
Harrisburg Art Association, summer 2005.

OTHER:
Artist Advidory Board, SpaceTaker, Houston TX, 2010-2011
Painting Lab Coordinator, Art League Houston, 2009-2011
SpeakEasy: Slide lecture, Spacetaker Houston TX, 2009
Slide Jam: Slide lecture, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston TX, 2009
Visiting Artist: Slide Lecture, Art History class, Iskra Ivanova, Houston Community College, Houston TX 2009.
Hebrew teacher, Jewish Community Center Brit Shalom, State College PA 2005-2008
Academic Advisor for BA students. Hebrew university of Jerusalem, Department of General Studies, Jerusalem, Israel. 1995-1998
Research Assistant. Department of philosophy, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, 1995-1997
Instructor, Philosophy course. Ofra High School, Ofra, Israel 1996
Project Organizer, educational seminars. Gesher Educational Organization, Jerusalem, Israel, National service, 1992-1993.
Teacher, Hebrew, high school. Budapest Hungary. Israeli National Service, 1991-1992
Instructor. Studio Classes, Jerusalem, Israel 2001-2003.Classes: Drawing and painting Still Life from Observation, beginners and advanced. 
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