Stellusz place

Eti Jacobi Lelior: Monkeys in the Mist

Recipient of the Rappaport Prize for an Established Israeli Artist, 2022

24.9.24 – 1.3.25

Curator: Nicola Trezzi

Curator assistant: Kfir Meir

The art of Eti Jacobi Lelior (b. 1961, Jaffa; lives and works in Tel Aviv) unfolds a unique investigation into the history of painting. Throughout a career that began in the early 1990s, she has created a multifaceted yet cohesive body of work in which painting is understood in its broadest sense.

Jacobi Lelior’s works thus echo the language of painting in its multiple manifestations: from cave drawing to French Baroque painting; from animated Walt Disney cartoons to iconic works by Paul Cézanne and Marc Chagall.

Concurrently, she also experimented with several related media—drawing, print, and animation, etching and wall painting—while maintaining a studio routine focused on paintings in acrylic on canvas.

The most important aspect of Jacobi Lelior’s modus operandi, and what makes her approach unique, however, is her understanding of artmaking as an “infinite spiral” in which virtuosity and playfulness intertwine, allowing her to continuously evolve, honing her practice over and over. Finding herself in-between the position of the protagonist of Honoré de Balzac’s short story The Unknown Masterpiece (1831) and that of an athlete exercising daily to surpass her own previous record and excel, Jacobi Lelior believes that every work is a step forward from a previous painting, and therefore, for almost four decades now, she has been tirelessly working to achieve the impossible: to create the perfect painting.

 Based on these premises and in response to the galley’s unique architecture, this exhibition is devoted to paintings created in the last ten years. Divided into six sets of works, it features the most comprehensive examples of her so-called “abstract works,” all created with acrylic paint on two-by-two-meter canvases. These works represent a turning point in Jacobi Lelior’s path, primarily because with them she renounces all certainty a painter has—figure, line, perspective, etc.; and secondly because through the application of multiple layers of paint—never mixing the colors, but always superimposing, layer after layer—she generates a new sensorial experience. As a result, once the eyes adjust themselves to the works, additional layers of paint gradually become visible.