Watch videos of the concertina books
Watch a video of the sculpture ‘David Paints Children’
The straw men of the Carmel center
Yair Barak on Tama Goren’s – David paints children
Welcome to the wonderful hell of Tama Goren. The visit includes a puke party, severed heads, and human tomatoes. A car goes up in flames, terrifying bugs, and sweaty figures with hairy faces. Goren’s consciousness is a spontaneous and colorful eruption of a fertile and wild imagination, beauty, and temptation – horror and disgust.
In 1844, Heinrich Hoffmann wrote “Der Struwwelpeter” – an illustrated notebook that contained five stories – a gift for his three-year-old son. A year later, the first edition of the book was published, it was described by Hoffman as: “cheerful practicalities and humorous pictures with colorful and beautiful panels for children from three to six years by a cheerful and child-loving rhymer”. When the second edition appeared, Hoffmann signed it as Heinrich Kinderlieb (Heinrich Loves Children).
In the 90’s last century, Tama Goren used to hang out in the Carmel center (Haifa) with a group of boys and girls who shared their common interest in Rock and Punk culture, as well as teenage band members, and outsiders. In their evenings out they were occasionally joined by different characters, village bums, and marginal people – who exercised their imagination in telling stories. Thus, from such human connections – juicy urban legends arose. One of them revolves around David – an eccentric painter who had long conversations with them and in their imagination – used to invite children to his house and paint them. Goren sees the fringe types of her childhood as an analogy to her character in those years: the eccentric behavior, the non-conformist appearance, and social difference.
David Paints Children is a tribute exhibition to these youth days in Haifa, fringe culture, and Goren’s aesthetic and musical influences. The wide-ranging body of work in the exhibition was created over the past two years and includes oil paintings, paper drawings, illustrated books, paper cutouts, and figurines. The worlds from which the images in the exhibition are drawn are wide and varied: starting with Victorian botanical paintings, German illustrations of the late 19th century, folk tales, and more.
Within the various mediums and the diverse worlds of content, a distinct connecting thread is woven yet is not easy to define. These are grotesque representations, sometimes nightmarish and, in other cases, funny scenes that range from everyday gestures to disasters. Goren creates a cynical yet touching imaginative wild world of characters with mythical status by using her consistent and recognizable artistic language, which is personally distinct and characteristic like one’s handwriting.
This is a world that refuses to accept the normative rules of reality, A world where vegetables and flowers have legs and facial expressions, creatures wear grass fur and others are made of straw. It is a sort of Halloween fair in a southern American suburban town.
The beating heart of the exhibition is eight concertina books. Some produce a panoramic scene or a narrative scene (the school book) while others produce a linear sequence of brilliantly colored illustrations (the Marble Club book). The continuous viewing of the books and walking along the display tables increase the narrative quality of Goren’s work and the depth of the parallel universe she creates.
Despite the otherness of the world that Goren creates, there is much of this world in it; Ridiculous characters, violence, funny scenes, and, it must be said – a decent dose of cuteness. See for example the rabbit biting the girl’s red pants or the flying radishes. Tama Goren’s works are an immersive and exciting journey of ever-changing emotions in a world that refuses to be one-dimensional.
*The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Avner Ben-Gal
Tama Goren (b. 1978)
Tama is a self-taught artist who lives and works in Tel Aviv.
Goren’s art studies in high school and her dedication to painting since being a young girl, followed by her experience of working as a fashion model in London, Paris, Milan, and Athens for over a decade, add a unique perspective to her resume.
Goren began exhibiting in 2011 and has since presented nine solo exhibitions and participated in dozens of group exhibitions. Goren’s works are typically forceful, expressive, Avant-Garde, dark, and strange. It occasionally includes a social critique combined with allusions to folklore, the Holocaust, German folk tales, and other unique combinations of symbols and subjects that are not connected to reality. All are presented with sadness and Dark humor.
Goren’s major projects include exhibiting in Berlin’s Circle1 gallery and publishing an artist book with the poet Daniel Oz. Furthermore, she had a solo exhibition in 2019 in the Zaritzky Artists House TLV curated by the artist Tsibi Geva.
Recently, she exhibited a solo show “The Long-Dead,” (2021) in Tel Aviv’s Hamidrasha Art Gallery, curated by Yair Barak followed by the duo show “Interested in a Double Headed” (2022) with artist Avner Ben-Gal.
This is Goren’s 10th solo exhibition curator by Yair Barak as the second part of their continued work.