Artist’s Statement

 

Most of my paintings and sculptures depict concepts relating to nature, time and place. The lexicon I employ continues to evolve alongside my own personal growth, encompassing images including house, tree, path, pit, shadow, animal and bird, which are featured in my works in various permutations.

My artistic work is influenced both by my inner reality and by the external one. I am motivated by past and future, by memories, longings, hopes and fears. I have always felt driven to express the effects of these realities—inner and outer—on me through materials, endeavoring to reconcile the differences between them. My motives and insights, as well as my approach to art itself, progress and change as they adapt to my own evolution and to the freedom and the dynamic borders I erect for myself.

I was profoundly impacted by my late father, Avraham Ofek, who gave me the foundational structure for creativity and art. I have acquired experience and knowledge thanks to many outstanding figures, many of whom I was fortunate to know through my father.

In my work, I make use of a variety of technologies and media that have long traditions in the art world. I work in pencil, oil and gouache, make etchings and woodcuts, and sculpt with wood, metals, clay and stone. My choice of medium and methodology is, on the one hand, intuitive and adapted to the seasonal conditions and the materials available to me, and on the other hand, aware of and in dialogue with the layers of collective human sensibilities they store.

In retrospect, my work has always been characterized by serials, although their scope often changes, and there have been unique creations as well. I believe this is my way of processing a certain point in time or a particular thought, turning it over and over until I find its point of equilibrium. I work out of a sense of love and belonging, and the absence of these. The inner tensions between mind, emotion and urges, find their expression in my art, in the space between two-dimensional and three-dimensional.