Orit Hofshi

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 Born in 1959, is currently working in Herzliya , Israel, following a decade of studying, working and exhibiting in the US. Orit, who has received her MA in Arts from Leeds University, UK, first studied in the Wizo College of Design in Israel. Upon graduating, she continued her studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where she majored in painting and printmaking.

 

Statement

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My practice is primarily based on drawing and printmaking, though I frequently experiment and disregard what would be labeled as common formalistic conventions.

 

Much of my work is focused on the relation between nature and social occurrences. I spend a great deal of time in various natural settings and am attracted to extreme and rugged landscapes, taking numerous photographs, which nourish my thinking and processing in the studio. The landscapes are typically proposed as places, occupied and unoccupied, touched and untouched, rarely fully committed in a specific context. In such dramatic natural contexts I find an emphasized sense of evolution, time and struggles, not only as records of natural phenomenon but also as reflections of human history.

 

My work process is characterized by the consistent preoccupation with the dimension of time. I am constantly searching for ways of making time palpable: personal time, the present time, historical time. Calendric time as well as geological, environmental and human activity remnants’ time – examining these different temporal dimensions vis-à-vis the universal temporal dimension, a dimension that may exceed the limitation of human understanding. Such a realization may serve to undermine our sense of self-importance, our tendency to place our own existence at the center, our own hubris.