TEL AVIV.- A solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art features the painter Roni Taharlev, the recipient of the 2022 Shiff Prize for Figurative-Realist Art. Taharlev studies the human body, and especially the female body. She explores its various dimensions in depth, while engaging with the history of art, classical traditions, and religious, mythological, and literary themes.

At the heart of the exhibition is a series of recent works centered on older women, whom Taharlev liberates of the cultural constraints that circumscribed them and fixed their meaning. Displayed alongside them are figures marked by ambiguous gender identities, powerful self-portraits, and charcoal and pastel drawings that are being presented for the first time. Together, these works create a mesmerizing interweave of figures that touches, with great sensitivity, on power relations, identity, gender, motherhood, age and sexuality.

Roni Taharlev builds on the tools and symbols of classical figurative painting to speak about the body and undermine accepted perceptions of the female body and gender roles, while exploring femininity, power, and the blurred boundaries between gender identities. Her paintings are characterized by a strange kind of light, the angels have thick legs and cellulite, the Virgin Mary is over 40 and gives birth to the much-awaited infant while wearing a bra and socks, and ambiguously gendered figures in dresses inhabit an undefined temporal sphere.

At the heart of the exhibition is a series recently centered on older women, which offers a unique and bold contemporary interpretation of the Christian scenes of the Annunciation and the Nativity. The formal dialogue between these female figures charges their relationship with intimacy, while involving a sense of estrangement and distancing. This intriguing ambivalence clearly captures the spirit of Taharlev’s multilayered oeuvre, which tells a story in which what is concealed remains greater than what is revealed. Taharlev’s consistent engagement with ambiguous gender identities is revealed in the exhibition in a series of portraits featuring Harry, a British youth whose penetrating, charismatic presence combines subversion and vulnerability. By means of changing outfits and backgrounds, Harry is transformed in each scene into an enigmatic, a-temporal figure. The exhibition also includes additional bodies of work created by Taharlev over the years, including penetrating self-portraits devoid of compassion, a powerful portrait of the artist’s mother, and charcoal and pastel drawings that are on display for the first time.

Roni Taharlev (b. 1964) is a figurative painter concerned with the human figure. Her body of work, which has developed over the course of three decades, can be viewed as an evolving study of the portraiture genre. Taharlev teaches drawing and painting at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Her works have been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, and her paintings are included in many local and international collections. They have been exhibited at important European museums, including the National Portrait Gallery in London and Edinburgh. In 2019, she was chosen by the Louvre Museum to participate in an exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first landing on the moon, which was held at the Grand Palais in Paris. This exhibition featured her work, the only one by a contemporary woman artist, alongside works by Poussin, Manet, Dalí, Miró and others.