Ruthi Helbitz Cohen: Sunset

In her works, Ruthi Helbitz Cohen creates an atmosphere of a ball and a masquerade, where identity is transient and can be replaced by other, more creative and theatrical personas. According to curator Uri Dessau, Helbitz Cohen creates a setting that posits self-identity as a sort of performance subjected to eternal transformation. Her paintings – shifting between two- and three-dimensional representations – produce painted installations characterized by images of body parts, tree roots, and mostly deconstructed feminine figures.

Helbitz Cohen invites the viewer to wander around her installations' images and to sense the meaning of the physical space between them as well. The nightmarish-dreamlike world offers a new experience of observation, challenging the familiar order. Of course, her works are not created in a vacuum, but rather react to the surrounding socio-political reality. Without taking a concrete stance, Helbitz Cohen seeks to create an open space in which viewers can rethink their own position.

In the present installation the artist invites the viewer to visit her studio, exposing work processes that are rarely seen or presented in exhibition halls. Visitors to the exhibition thus become voyeurs; and indeed the exhibition hall is reminiscent of a voyeurs' room, offering a view onto the place where the artist stores her findings, a place she designed herself, creating the possibility of observing and coming into contact with the exhibition’s display. The viewers search and inquire, producing a period of movement in space. They wander about, as if strolling along city streets, peeking, seeing, feeling, and hearing their surroundings.