BoysCraft

Erez Israeli

Erez Israeli's work is related to his ongoing preoccupation with images of mourning and commemoration, and the flowers it contains recur in different works: in the version that preceded this installation, For the Lady of the Flowers, the artist created a military memorial wreath out of tiny beads. He was inspired by the writer Jean Genet, who described the prisoners he saw weaving funeral wreaths while he himself was in prison. In another work, Israeli sewed Gerberas - the official flower of IDF funeral wreathes - to his skin, and forcefully pulled off their petals and stamens. In this installation, the ethos of commemoration and morning grows even more pervasive, while the blood-red flowers seem to seep into the green expanse, simultaneously injuring it and covering up for the presence of death seething below its surface. Like other labor-intensive processes, the process of beading inevitably marks the passage of time; it has thus been adopted by numerous artists as a ritual of mourning, culminating in stunningly beautiful  products.

Born in Be'er Sheva, 1974; lives and works in Tel Aviv