Irit Yatziv: Pretty Girls Make Grills

Irit Yatziv creates a syntax. She deconstructs and reconstructs colors and contents, fusing craft, art, design, fashion, and communication, inverting hierarchies and questioning the interrelations between the political and the visual. The work materials are drawn from the visual language inundating us. They generate a spectrum that oscillates between fragmentation and harmony, tonality and atonality.

By incorporating extra-artistic materials, such as press clips, magazine pages, advertisements, and textiles, in her works, Yatziv corresponds with Dada and Pop Art. While these artistic currents were motivated by environmental contexts foreign to the work itself, however, Yatziv employs readymade to return to traditional aesthetic values: space and color. "I constantly try to capture the myriad images around us, to discipline and process them."

The garment, the paper cutting, sheds its habitual meaning, assuming a new one. The figure, the advert, and the word function as paint, fusing to form a personal, subjective expression whereby the most conspicuous means to articulate the artist's inner word is color. Yatziv strives to bridge antithetical artistic approaches, one strives to express the artist's emotional-impulsive inner vision, the other—to reflect culture and change social values. In the viewing experience too, she combines two circles perceived as disparate: everyday life and art. Her participation in the work and the viewer's inclusion by means of mirrors which reflect his image and bring him into the collage eliminate the distinction between observation of a thing and being a part of it, between object and subject.

The exhibition space unites the viewer, the artist, and the exhibited works; the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional; a collage by Matisse, an advertisement for a sofa, and a news image. Yatziv's combinations inspire a sense of dissonance. Thus, for example, the title of the exhibition, " Pretty Girls Make Grills," which appears in one of the collages and was extracted from an advertisement, is associated with everyday reality, generating a gender and aesthetic ideal. Dissonance runs like a thread throughout the exhibition. It is resolved by means of the harmony in the color combinations.

By eliminating the hierarchy between the quotidian and art, between high art, anti-art, and a seductive commodity, and by finding aesthetic qualities in the so-called "low,"
Yatziv sets out to expand and blur the boundaries of art.

Tamar Eloul, curator