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Second Glance: The Portrait in Hagit Shahal's Work
Dr. Guy Morag Tzepelewitz
In the course of her artistic career, Hagit Shahal has engaged repeatedly with portraiture and the documentation of expression. In recent years, following the introduction of the camera into cell phones, self-documentation and the portrait have become central to the visual language surrounding us. While echoes of the photographic act and the need for documentation may be identified as recurring motifs in Shahal's oeuvre, in the current exhibition one may sense a dialectical tension between the works, which almost calls for their division into two.
With a limited, monochromatic, draftswoman's palette, Shahal creates two series of prints distinguished by their subject matter and its treatment. The first addresses femininity. Amidst Frida Kahlo, Coco Chanel, and the teacher Avigail, one encounters Shahal's own portrait. With only a few contours, she situates her image within a sequence of powerful women who have influenced her and shaped her inner world. Shahal, however, does not immerse herself in the soft nostalgic image; she constructs an entire world of images which touches upon aesthetics, flattening the image. She splits the space in two so that each portrait is also given a doppelganger?or, in her case, a female double, set against a backdrop of ornamental wallpaper unique to each portrait. Alongside the women, Shahal also presents female accessories associated with aesthetics as well as with the female body using or wearing them, such as a dress or stiletto shoes. Unlike the women, who are depicted at the margins of the paper, the objects occupy the center of the composition, thereby acquiring the validity of a portrait. At the end result of this female series, the viewer confronts a flat, one-dimensional image which elicits questions about Shahal's attitude towards the female body and the female portrait, as well as the need to decorate the latter with aesthetic justification.
This modus operandi is contrary to the depiction of male figures in the exhibition. Whereas the prints of female imagery may call to mind art created by women mainly in the 1980s and 1990s, the works featuring male portraits go back several decades, to the art of engraving practiced mainly by men back in the early 20th century . Shahal thus takes a surprising step: she portrays the men in a different, somewhat romantic, three-dimensional and much more refined manner than the women, omitting the ornaments and the background as a whole. Despite the gap between these different modes of treatment, both series illustrate Shahal's urge to explore the modern tradition of portraiture that preceded her?from Elizabeth Peyton who was active in the late 20th century to Hermann Struck in the beginning of the same century?while delving into portraiture as a contemporary theme, and the ways in which its treatment influences the image itself and the viewer's experience.
[Hebrew copy editing and consultation: Noga Stiassny]
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