Raw Art Gallery is a young and innovative Israeli contemporary art gallery, dedicated to exhibit and promote emerging and cutting-edge contemporary Israeli and international artists locally and worldwide. Raw Art Gallery goal is to become a center of excellence for contemporary art in Tel Aviv, have an effective presence in the cultural life of the city and be a worthy ‘art ambassador’ in the international art community.
Raw Art Gallery was established in September 2005 and since has become one of the most prominent, lively and dynamic art exhibitions spaces in the Israeli art scene. Raw Art Gallery first major project was “Slow Dance Marathon - Tel Aviv 2006″ a continuous art project, by Cypriot performance and video artist Christodoulos Panayiotou. On March 2007, we have opened a new 2500 sq.ft. art space, that includes a private Show Room for collectors. The new space, will allow us to enrich our exhibition program and develop a broader based and accessible outreach to public education programs.
Uri Dotan and Avraham Pesso
A dialog between two solo exhibitions at Raw Art Gallery.
Back in the 80’s both Uri and Avraham were part of the flagrant left wing spirit of Tel Aviv’s Sheinkin Street.
Uri Dotan and his brother Dani Dotan founded the “Tat Rama” and “Sheink-In” galleries and engraved the term “Sheinkiner” as a nickname for those who believe in the importance of art, culture and media in defining the Israeli being.
In 1995, shortly after Prime Minister Rabin was murdered, Avraham Pesso, an artistic rebel, set out for Kiryat Arba and smashed a bottle of black paint on the murderous Baruch Goldstein’s tombstone, so as to “obliterate the shame”.
Exactly one year ago, the two fellow artists met and learned of a change in the artistic perspective, common to both. The revelation proceeded through extensive correspondence and online chatting, and a creation that yielded a joint exhibition where the two worlds meet vis-à-vis.
Avraham Pesso looks at the world from high up. There are no people in his paintings. Perhaps they are at home or on the road. But he is way up there, painting what a bird or an alien or god would see. What Pesso sees happens in Israel, within the artificial boundaries separating Jewish city from an Arab village, old from new. From high above, the reasons for war seem as profound as deep as the nature of man and as meaningless as the lines that time draws between the habitats of different nations. Pesso sees only the products of man’s doing; the buildings and fields, the contours of separation between worlds which could be unified.
Uri Dotan climbs up to the third floor or to the top of some skyscraper to observe the docile march of people in crosswalks being transformed into an artistic secret. Dotan’s walkers split; they exist in parallel universes that briefly intersect on the zebra crossing. Which is the real one and which is the clone? Which one really saw the neon light and smelled the tree? Uri Dotan is a scientist-artist, in his experiments there is no distinction between original and its clone, they are all of equal class. They all dance, move, insignificant like particles meeting for a split second to create that which is complete.
Two solo exhibitions making up a joint one – Avraham Pesso’s painting and Uri Dotan’s photography – call upon spectators to find a different meaning to distance, time and the human existence on earth and asphalt.
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