The Sculpture Dog Mob was exhibited in Herzliya at the First Biennial of Contemporary Art in September 2007.  The sculpture featured both as a unique work of art carrying symbolic weight on many levels and also as an object accessible to the public, designed for the public's enjoyment and as a visual landmark of the city.

The sculpture is composed of a pack of oversized black dogs standing in a circle.  Their heads are poised down and it seems as though they are huddled round a solitary prey. Two of the dogs are joined to each other at various parts of their anatomy.  Only one dog's head gazes directly at the passers-by and it belongs to a two-headed dog.

"Dogs are a man's best friend" goes the saying.  We recognize dogs as personal and unique domestic animals, as loving creatures, tamed and loyal.  Yet a pack of dogs in the midst of a modern city is not an everyday sight. The unified group instantly reminds us of something much wilder, such as a pack of jackals or hyenas. It is a threatening image which blurs the line between culture and nature.

At the same time the dogs entice playfulness and discovery.  Their black color and the composition in which they are arranged do not enable us to view each one separately and interpreting the sight takes time.  From a distance, or while driving, they may look like one solid mass.  The dog's height allows children to climb on top of them, to crawl underneath them and to stroke them, while the circular structure encourages movement round the sculpture.

Nightmare at grand royal hotel is a series of medium sized etchings that attempt to depict the nightmarish world of fear and terror. They are presented in black and grey tones and are extremely graphic in style, using strong lines and clear flat images. The different scenes are all set in a makeshift forest, where all the trees are bare and the air is misty, the figures are represented as semi-human or mutated beastly dogs. The strong compositions are achieved by the distinct separation of black and grey areas representing land and sky.
The key image in almost all the etchings is the image of the mutilated dog/beast. It has been present in my work for the last three years and has evolved into an image that represents the essence of what I would describe as a nightmare, horror or dread. The appearance of these dogs is a distinct consequence of the horror I had to face while dealing with the horrible truth of cancer that spread through my mother's body. The cancer evoked frightening thoughts such as Death looming around the corner, or the betrayal of the body on its owner. The image of the mutilated dog or beast represents the duality between man's best friend the one minute and the next appearing as a wild and vicious beast.
During my visit to Ammersbek, Germany on April 2006 I adopted the local scenery as my private set where I created these nightmarish scenes of horror and despair.

The title Nightmare at Grand Royal hotel represents the absence of specific time and place as it is an imaginary place and yet has a familiarity to it as if we have heard of this place before. By removing it from personal context I feel it allows each viewer to interpret it into their own nightmare and not forcing them into my own world of horror. The fear becomes universal.

" In 1948, as the Israeli independence war ended, Israeli and Jordanian officials met to determine the border line between the two countries. After they came to agreement, a border line was drown on the paper map with wax pencils. As expected in the Middle East- policies and realities do not always go together. And so, after few years the local Mediterranean climate started to take its effect, and the wax pencil border line started to shift on the map." 
Yonatan Amir, from text about the exhibition "Shuman" (Fat)

Double Organ and Wet Plates are two pieces that where presented in the frame of the exhibition "Shuman". The exhibition brought together few artists who use unconventional materials in their process of creation. Like the wax pencil line mentioned in the short story above, these materials, and sometimes the finals appearance of the art work is in many cases uncontrollable and unpredictable.  

Double Organ is made of two similar caramel casts facing one another. it was originally created for the exhibition Sapak Koah. It has a strong physical appearance of an organic molecular form. Double Organ slowly disintegrated during the exhibition time.

In Wet plates the same material is being used, this time filled into laboratory Petri dishes. Embedded under the upper surface of the caramel are drawings of wet T shirt contests scenes. The outgoing ecstatic revelation of a healthy young half naked female body is being framed in what could be takes as surgical tools.       

The exhibition consists of several series of paintings as well as a body of sculptures.
The paintings depict impressions and findings from various points of time on a symbolic search for power generators. As journey impressions, they were created using a technique related to the world of illustration, where ink drawings are combined with the flooding of the reclining canvas with puddles of paint until the liquid is absorbed.
One series of paintings portrays organic bodies shaped as internal organs in a shade of pale grey, and opposite those, at the other end of the gallery, the "Speakers" Series depicts family members reading eulogies, each in turn, across the backdrop of a wood. Picturesque scenes of boats and seascapes and a pair of figures out at sea in the midst of darkness, are interwoven.
The main sculptural object of the exhibition consists of three hundred balls cast in caramel and placed in a heap on the floor of the gallery. The balls are similar in shape to the iron canon-balls of pirate ships, but could in actual fact serve as individual energy capsules that perish with time. An additional object displayed in an aquarium is something of an artificial coral that also resembles an internal organ in shimmering black-blue shades.

Legend has it that a person wearing a Mobius ring is able to pass between the physical dimension, where his body, soul and mind are found in an identical sphere-place-time, and the external-imaginary dimension, in which a multiplication takes place and a person looks at himself from the outside. The ring itself (take a strip of paper, twist one end of it 180 degrees and connect it to the other end) illustrates simply and clearly how dimensions change, eteriorate and mix up. A two-dimensional strip of paper in the form of a ring, seemingly having a well-defined inside and outside, turn into one three-dimensional continuum.

The work Mobius consists of several sculptural elements, trying to materialize the duality involved in the appearance of a disease, with the future becoming vague as a result. People falling ill with a serious and terminal disease, in this case cancer, bear witness to the fact that death, so far regarded as an abstract concept coped with mainly on the level of thought, turns into a day-to-day companion. In a way, the patient becomes a dweller of two worlds, the world of the living and the world of the dead, and it isn't always clear in which of them he is a tenant and in which a passing guest. In the same way that the Mobius ring creates the delusion of both a material and an imaginary world, the sick person involved is being deluded about the very existence of man and looses confidence in his or her own body.

In this piece of work, I tried to describe the struggle with the strong will to blend and fuse both of these scales, turning them into one constant and firm dimension. Behind the present work lies the wish to stop time, refrain from looking forward, freeze the here-and-now. However, this striving for constancy is destructive and blinding. It is a sort of desire beneath which looms a predetermined failure.

The work has a look of cleanliness and sterility: stainless-steel containers and transparent silicon piping taken from the world of medicine; blocks of ice next to them make up a delicate gray-blue coloring. Across them stand out the warm and fleshly caramel castings and the red rucksack.

The sculpturesque features in the presentation are seemingly useful elements: apliances known from everyday life that underwent some diverting. A rucksack and binoculars caught inside two ice blocks, each of them mounted on a stainless-steel stand reminiscent of a water-supply gadget. Stainless-steel pots full of caramel attached to the wall as if they were pissoires in a Men`s toilet.

The Snapshots Series

These paintings stem from a childhood memory: I am sitting on my grandfather’s knees, learning how to attach the little finger to the fourth finger, middle finger to index finger leaving the thumb separate, then thumb to index finger, fourth finger to middle finger, leaving the little finger separate. And so forth, over and over, quickly, without getting mixed up, both hands playing the finger game simultaneously.

Only years later, when I saw the photograph of my great grandfather’s tombstone, which bears the emblem of the priests, did I connect my affiliation to an assimilated family from Hungary, with the finger game my grandfather had taught me without explaining the whys and wherefores.

This image of a pair of palms parted as in the emblem of the priests, outlining an undefined area in the space between them, was the first in the Snapshots Series, which was produced almost entirely in the United States. In time the series became more substantial and random images of everyday life were incorporated. Family photographs, street corners in New York and Baltimore, friends’ photographs and images from the art world were integrated in a uniform format of work.

Almost all of the paintings in the series were produced using a uniform technique and format; an outline of brown ink and a metallic blue shade of water colour, which is placed as a puddle of liquid on the reclining canvas until it is absorbed and in some places ingests the brown ink.

Open series All paintings 35 x 45 cm

Prints, Last Series

This series of prints consists of several variations based on a recurring print of eight round iron plates, identical in size, etched and burned in various circles.

The captivating colourfulness and aesthetics of the circle, which can be likened in shape to a cross-section of a tree trunk, has been printed over with images of Israeli medicinal herbs. The herbs resemble the circle in the pleasant sensation they generate and in the connection with nature, but are inherently different. The medicinal herbs and their colours are few and faint, they will mostly be bare thorns or weeds. Their power lies in inner fulfillment.

A third element in this juncture of beauty, nature and the seed of illness is presented in prints where the full circle begins to divide, to clone itself and to be soiled.

This series of prints is an attempt to find the delicate point where sickness and noise are planted, or wedge their first step into the clean, unravished body.

The series includes 11 prints in colour and in black and white Length 80cm, width 60-120cm

As they left, I Lay Down and Dreamed I Was Running (Disease Diaries)

A video piece into which two diaries are interwoven
The first is a sickness journal drawn up and typed on the computer, which my mother kept from the initial discovery that the cancer had reinhabited her body, throughout the prolonged treatment sessions and until her prospective recovery. The diary was kept for a purely technical reason: its purpose is to inform distant relatives. Only afterwards will the diary serve as a souvenir and literary testimony. The diary excerpts are presented using textual slides whose appearance is well synchronized.
The second is my own video diary consisting of various sights, which at times accompany my mother and at times lead elsewhere. It is not a diary of a patient follow-up, but rather of one who remains at the patient’s side. One who has the choice of mounting the rollercoaster of another’s life and dismounting at any time. In spite of that, the editorial method attempts to create a structural parasite in the film and, in so doing, to portray the cancer’s relation to the patient’s body.

Duration: 12 minutes