Uzi Zur, Haaretz, Culture and Literature section / Closed One Eye

Cocoons as They Are

Anat Ofer: “Please do not touch” Limbus Gallery, Tel Aviv.

Deep inside the protective shelter of Limbus Gallery, the fragile works of Anat Ofer are hung, as if by a thread.  If you will transgress the prohibition and touch them, they will dissimilate in front of your eyes. From the drawers of her grandmother, Anat Ofer drew shreds of memories and united them back together. In an almost invisible tangle of gentle webs, she creates new old animals. She succeeds, thanks to her candid obsessiveness and incredible refinement, to deviate from the tiring stream, which already become infamous, of the “objects” art and their recycle under a pretense of sexuality, or any other pseudo-fashionable idea.   

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After the ropes she had pulled over entire rooms went and gotten smaller, the ropes became strings and they wrap miniature works, with an airy, weightless feeling of spider webs.

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In her last exhibition in Gross gallery, Ofer tied the “broken pieces of her heart” to a ball of twine that lifted from the ground, being anchored to it only with slim webs. This way, wrapped as a little mummy, it is floating, not-floating, in the light. And this time, above high and narrow white canes, floating or resting are the weaved connections, and the almost dramatic light, falling from above, emphasizes them: a cradled mobile of a wild, thin, black string creates an entangled ball of twine, in which curved hooks are captured.  A sort of a tiny stool, whose body was ripped in endless knots of a dark and thin string; out of the warp and weft, tiny stems erect and on the top of each one, a light crochet drop of nectar.

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On a small rectangle piece of wood, Ofer planted three lines of minuscule branches. Despite the minuscule size, it is a world of its own; each branch has its own movement and twitch; and together they are like a weird forest casting an accurate, delusional shadow.   

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A beautiful mobile with brown rings, like fat, dried worms, captured in a thin weave of a flimsy iron string, is completely encircled by spider webs that glow with light, transparent almost as a pupa that dies in its bud. This light, stuffed mobile, moves freely in the air, floating over the stand on which it creates gentle shadows- an organic, whispering composition. 

 Friday, November 20, 1998.