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Yaara Zach is the winning artist of the Ann and Ari Rosenblatt Prize for Visual Art 2022.

In 2024 Zach exhibited her solo show at The Artists House Tel Aviv, as part of the Rosenblatt prize. 

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The Sun Sets Twice

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Text by Orly Hoffman

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In the exhibition "The Sun Sets Twice" Yaara Zach presents sculptural works, created over the last four years. With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the restriction of mobility in the public space, the artist collected abandoned shopping carts, which she found on her wanderings on the deserted streets in her vicinity, and these became raw materials for her art. In the featured works, she revisits the image of the shopping cart—a serviceable auxiliary object, associated with consumerist society, but also with life on its margins, signifying different customs and cultures, a community and a place, like a morphology of man and environment; from the original cart, however, she leaves only remnants and hints. 

Zach extracts basic shapes from the cart's body—a line, a circle, a square—which form the foundation for her sculptural works. She creates a syntax of material and formal structures, alluding to Constructivist art, which emphasizes industrial materials and the representation of reality via geometric abstraction. Her sculptural objects are hybrids, crosses between readymade parts taken from the carts, and metal materials, stretched, elongated or assembled into spherical bodies, such as weights. The parts, which were disassembled, sketched, and bent around the artist's body, echo the memory of a body on a human scale. They intertwine and split, resembling vegetal patterns or a web of capillaries, which interlace and spread like tumors that grow out of control. Zach infuses the industrial metal with organic qualities, maintaining a cycle of end and beginning.

The sculptures are painted in metallic automotive colors, and are grouped in color colonies. The objects exist as independent units: they are cast on the floor, lean against the wall, or support each other, and together they materialize into an installation that spreads throughout the gallery space. The works maintain a delicate balance. They call an upright, supportive, firm body to mind, and at the same time point to transience, which necessarily carries the potential for change and collapse.

Zach brings the viewer into her work and initiates a dialogue between bodies, between the human body and the sculptural body. The viewer bends, approaches, and moves away, pacing among elongated sculptural works that stretch from floor to ceiling, folded, twisted, separated or connected to each other. She generates an interactive relationship between them, like a dance choreography in the space. The linear sculptures make up an expressive installation, which rises from the volumes trapped between them, and turns, under Zach's hands, into an abstract plastic work, resembling a painting in space. Zach's work delves into absence. She converts the mass into the contour lines of a void and challenges the power relations between matter and space, which rely on what is present and fill in the absent gaps.

Zach's sculptural installation in "The Sun Sets Twice" opens up a "threshold" area outside the linear timeline, a realm which exists between and within times, and between action and suspension; an illusory space resulting from a mirage between the visible and the invisible, which gives rise to a sense of fluid reality. She creates an elusive world, which oscillates between the foreign and the familiar, the permanent and the transient, raising questions about consciousness and memory, both collective and personal.

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The exhibition was produced with the support of the Rabinovich Foundation.

Photo documentation  by Tal Nisim