Formally Speaking

Gabi Kricheli

Gabi Kricheli's work is presented in the Museum's backyard, which is dedicated to temporal outdoor art. The work consists of approximately one hundred handmade cement castings; hence, from a technical point of view, it ought to be termed a sculptural work or a sculptural installation. Nevertheless, the work also refers explicitly to painting-each of the small casts is decorated with a different ornamental pattern, colored differently, and each is blended with yellow, blue or green pigment.

From a distance-in fact, from an overview-one may identify the exact ornamental pattern by which the casts were arranged on the ground, and to complete the shape as imagined by the artist in our mind's eye: Krichelli related to the entire museum as an object to be decorated, which, in the meantime, is adorned only from the courtyard side. On a closer look, the sense of order is lost, and the viewer drowns in a sea of colorful objects.

When it was first installed on an asphalt plot in Tel Aviv, the work consisted of some 700 casts, and was entitled Aquarium. The reduced Haifa-based version was first installed in the Museum courtyard in January 2011, and was named Aquarium 2.0, as new software versions are marked after each update (e.g. Photoshop 4.1). Toward the current exhibition, Krichelli added another painterly dimension to the casts, and updated the title to Aquarium 2.2. He painted the casts with an array of translucent pastel colors which provide a watercolor feel, and with industrial paints which lend the cement a near-radiant hue. The entire yard, complete with its objects, transforms into a painterly surface, and the cement casts ostensibly melt into the painterly world.

The cement donation courtesy of Acme Trading

Born in Israel, 1979; lives and works in Tel Aviv