About Hava Gal-On
I define myself as a multidisciplinary artist. I started my journey in the art world as an auto-didact, I studied and specialized on the go, alongside several senior Israeli artists, and today I dedicate all my time to art.
My studio in Tel Aviv provides the visitor with a colorful and rich experience; the content ranges from personal and biographical issues to actuality, society, and politics, including the internal politics of the art world. My personal touch is expressed in every object in the studio: large paintings on canvas, paintings on objects from everyday life, surprising connections between objects collected or found on the street and picturesque contents, miniatures rich in beads and colored stones, painting tools and empty paint tubes turned into sculptural objects, boxes and containers featuring flowers, birds, texts, and more ...
I like to redeem discarded objects that are no longer needed and give them new life and new meanings. Thus, one can find among my works ironing boards, trampolines, cutting boards, suitcases, trays, mirrors, empty shoe boxes (and shoes that have really been used by me over the years), all of these, like clay in my hands, undergo a process of sublimation. Contributing to this process is my extensive use of colorful traditional Jewish texts, which function both as content and as artistic images.
I do not belong to a particular school, nor am I committed to one art genre. I move between several disciplines and genres, consciously ignoring the academic and institutional conventions of right and wrong; too independent to be identified with the artistic establishment on the one hand, too curious and fast learner to be identified as a complete outsider.
Within my wide and prolific work there is occasionally a hold over a more significant body of works, whether in terms of content or in terms of multiplicity and seriality. "Homage", for example, is the title of a broad body of work that is also a personal journey among works by Israeli and international artists. While not being satisfied with artistic quotes, I have freely copied masterpieces and famous works, without paying attention to the accuracy and while embedding my unique style in the "copied" works.
Such an additional body of works is a series of ready-made suitcases, painted and covered with texts, some autobiographical and some from traditional Hebrew sources. I worked on the external or internal sides, and sometimes on both sides. The initial suitcase is dedicated to my father, carrying pictures, objects and images that were part of his world. Another suitcase unfolds the relationship with my late husband since the beginning of our life together up to his death. Another one yet quotes Rabbi Nachman of Breslov's ‘Tikkun Haklali’ (The General Remedy) in its entirety, to the last suitcase in the series that has been dealt with in the lockdowns, in the shadow of the corona virus that attacked the world.
Trampolines are an old love of mine, and I still tend to jump on one every now and then. Over the years, many of them have fallen out of use, and naturally have become a painted and treated body of works. Some deal with personal issues and some with the Genesis story of creation through texts and images. Like the rest of my works, the trampolines are characterized by laborious, continuous work, word for word, color and more color, combinations, and gluing.
If the abundance and richness that characterize my work in general can be summed up, or distilled as an experience, then it is a copious dose of optimism and joy of life; I just rock it!