During August and early September 2022, the Artists House in Tel Aviv hosted an exhibition of works by veteran Jerusalemite artist, Liat Polotsky. The exhibition is showcasing several series of paintings, including some that deal with global warming, the disasters this phenomenon may well cause, as a message, and documentation of them in retrospect.
The oil painted works portray feelings of loss, finality, and a loss of control over what is happening in our world, as projected from personal experience. At the age of six, Liat Polotsky experienced the disintegration of her nuclear family because of its polarized views. A mother who had turned her back on religion, and a father who was a born-again religious man. Subsequently, her father severed contact with his non-religious family, including his daughter, Liat Polotsky. These familial circumstances combined to intensify her curiosity about the processes of life, growth, and the seeds of inevitable end those processes contain. All elements that serve as the foundation of her developing, exploratory art.
The artist's style leans to a refined and transcendent abstract – touching on the limits of cognition, seeking the limits of knowledge and experience. The light is much like the flame, illuminating, but also consuming and destroying. This polarity expresses the duality that exists in the experience of life and creation, a duality that is etched into the artist's identity. External impressions, landscapes and events, are processed and experience a metamorphosis – they turn into a message and a call to observe; to understand and to save. The influence of a variety of art movements, diverse cultures and rich experiences, is clearly evident in Liat Polotsky's work – from Jewish Kabbalah to Japanese culture, from the sun washed Israeli landscape, to nights in the Brazilian savannah illuminated by fire. Each image is a reflecting of an internal experience, written by the artist in the hidden script only the subconscious mind knows how to write.
The works reveal the stages of global warming, from lush green vistas, through a simmering ball, to a world grayer than ashes, all painted as miniatures, a medium in which the artist excels. They simulate a view from above – as if the viewer is looking through a telescope hovering in space. They observe us, we who live here on the surface of the planet, and project a feeling of emotionally detached study and observation. They document the gradual processes of extinction like a hidden scientist observing a culture received for testing.
The paintings offer a detached perspective that balances the works that burn with an inner heat and fire in which the artist is emotionally involved, suffering the pain of what is unfolding around her. A depiction of the fires burning in the Amazon Forest continues the message conveyed by the above-mentioned work and forces the viewer closer to the realization of the inevitable outcome of a conscious process of annihilation – a process that is failing to properly comprehend the inevitable end it will cause.
The works are a ‘shout of desperation’, calling on us all to see the devastation from up close, not just from the headlines of newspapers and through the prism of television broadcasts that create the illusion we are protected by distance from the ecological catastrophe taking place right before our eyes.
The series shown in the exhibition are experienced as a photo album that will be studied in the future when we and our descendants will watch the documentation of what preceded the extinction of nature on our world. They urge us to look at that futuristic album so we can act to prevent the actualization of what is described in it.
The work that seals Liat Polotsky's wake-up call is ‘Global Harmony’. In shades of green, from dark to light, she describes the stages of growth and fertility she yearns to see realized in all dimensions and plains – cultural, social, personal and ecological. Her prayers are for the cessation of material extinction and an end to alienation and the polarization of human society. And this is her legacy, her personal plea from the world and from all of us.
Exhibition Curator: Aryeh Berkowitz. Public Relations: Sigal Eyal. Photography: Yair Hovav.
Written and Edited by Yoel Emet – Member of the Academic Sector Association of Journalists. © All Rights Reserved.