I work primarily in painting and drawing, with a focus on works on paper. A sense of intimate, sometimes unsettling closeness between the self and its surroundings runs through my work, marked by the dissolution and blurring of the boundary between inside and outside. This is both an existential experience and one inherent to the media of painting and drawing, in which the distinction between figure and ground, object and environment, is only an illusion ready to collapse at any moment. The images I create grow out of bodily memories of specific places: the smell, the texture, the angle of light at a street corner, in a field, by a riverbank. These fragments arise from a desire to keep a place alive in memory, to tell the stories of what happened there—or might have happened. From such small, intimate memories, I weave larger narratives about the place itself: its history, its transformations, and the lives lived there.
In the studio, I continually return to the question: how can a painting be experienced as a place—and what kind of place is a painting? This question has led me to experiment with different formats that extend into installations and explore how painted images inhabit and transform spaces. Over the past years, I have been working on wide scroll formats that invite the viewer to engage with them step by step or to read them like a text, drawing on traditional scrolls and tapestries.
Alongside my work as an artist, I am a scholar in the field of philosophy of art and political theory. My recent postdoctoral research project, “Environmental Imaginaries” in contemporary Israeli and Palestinian art (Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin), explored these themes on a conceptual level and in the work of other artists.
Contact: almaitzhaky@gmail.com
Gallery: https://dvirgallery.com/viewing-room/13-alma-itzhaky-pupae-solo-show/
This website was built with the support of Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt.