Israel Hadany's work sails above the realms of time, revealing a longing for the innermost recesses of the soul. For many years he sought a spiritual form open enough for the spirit to dwell in it and ascend. In his travels between ancient cultures in the Near and Far East, he has absorbed images of sacred and prayer structures: mosque domes, temple pagodas, and vaults, that aspire upward and evoke a sense of elation.

The series of metaphysical drawings in black ink and colored pencils, presented here for the first time in Israel, was created by Hadany out of a focused stream of consciousness over the course of a month. The point of view from which they were drawn observes from a bird's eye view, revealing idiosyncratic sculptural structures which belong neither to a particular culture, nor to a given place or time. The gate (or focal point, visible in some of them) invites us to draw nearer, to go in and experience a moment of sanctity in the halls of infinity, which we are unable to contain. Alongside the symmetry and sense of formal perfection characterizing them, many of the drawings contain clear evidence of an inevitable process of destruction. Despite their small size, they seem to portray monumental structures or the remains thereof; like a reminder that human civilizations, even the most glorious ones, are doomed to become extinct and return to earth.

Some of the drawings echo previous sculptures created by Hadany in plywood, several of which are on view here.  The axis connecting them is his search for a pure, primal essence. The sculptures' tight minimalism and spiritual dimension conjure up the statues of deities in the cultures of the ancient East, as in Knossos and The Angel of Memory, and in the drawings, in which Hadany invites us to regard the human body as a temple, an altar, or a vessel. The plywood rings ostensibly mark the passage of time. The body becomes a hollow vessel, which is open to the sky, spreading its wings.

Hadany, who has created dozens of large-scale environmental sculptures for public spaces, elaborates them from a scaled down model placed on his desk. In the drawings and sculptures in this exhibition, it is as though the monumental redraws into the intimate, bowing its head humbly to listen to the memories of the earth. 

Shir Meller-Yamaguchi, curator