Hagai Ulrich

Hagai Ulrich, a graduate of Bezalel's Master's Program in Fine Arts (M.F.A., 2015) in Tel-Aviv, and Hamidrasha Faculty of Arts, Beit-Berl College (2012), is a Tel-Aviv-based, Israeli-Austrian artist, who has exhibited his works in Israel and abroad, a writer about photography and contemporary art, and an independent curator. Since 2016 he has been working as the editorial coordinator of Tohu Magazine, an online art magazine for art and culture published in three languages: English, Hebrew, and Arabic (co-editors and co-founders: Avi Lubin and Leah Avir). For the past four years, he has co-curated the "Bread and Roses" shows, and in the past year has been the curator of Bread and Roses Gallery in Tel-Aviv and its manager. Ulrich has won the TIAF Scholarship, Tel Aviv University (2019); a Certificate of Excellence in Bezalel's Master of Arts Program (2015); a TA Scholarship of the Bezalel Master of Arts Program (2014); And an Award for Excellence in Art by the Hamidrasha Faculty of Arts, Beit-Berl College (2012).

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An Illusion about Understanding

In Richard Deacon's comprehensive solo show at the Prague Municipal Gallery, to see the large-scale sculptures viewers must get close, bend down, crane their necks upward, focus on the small details, and then again step back and look at the whole work. These exploratory actions that the viewers perform with their bodies and their movement through space have led Hagai Ulrich to try to understand how Deacon manages to physically express ideas, symbols, and signs that cannot be realized in time and space.

Beloved Country

Orit Ishay's comprehensive show at the Prague City Gallery includes images of bomb shelters, military uniforms, mourning rituals, woman soldiers, and a scrapbook of local dried flowers that had been given to General Allenby. It seems that the entirety of activities Ishay engages in creates an interesting critical course in which information loses its content and reality sheds its substance.

Black Swan, White Swan

"Slowland," Bianca Eshel Gershuni's and Oree Holban's joint exhibition, opened at Barbur Gallery in Jerusalem in the wake of the highly visible dispute between the gallery and the municipality, and the latter's attempts at censorship. Hagai Ulrich visited the show and returned with some thoughts about the political prospects suggested by the space the two have built.

Crimes and Misdemeanors

Do the works of Michal Makaresco represent cheap fetishism and dubious situations? Were they made casually, easily, or on a whim? Hagai Ulrich visited the show at Hamidrasha Gallery in Tel Aviv and came back with thoughts about good taste, honesty, as well as questions about weight and scale.

Internal Interactions

Contemporary painting as the wreckage pile of Modernism or genuine Modernist painting? Focusing on composition or the subjects? Hagai Ulrich writes for Tohu on "Take Painting," showing at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art.

Temporary Structures

Many emotionally and politically charged places appear in Nir Evron's work, among them  Rawabi, the new Palestinian city, the Seven Arches Hotel on Mount Olive, in Jerusalem, and the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia, USA. What happens to the concreteness of the locations and the specific political stories when the works separate content and form? Hagai Ulrich reviews Evron's show, "Masad (Foundation)."

Homonyms

Hagai Ulrich on the homonyms in Yossi Breger's last show, on the relations between single words and the continuum, and on the idea of the abstract whole.

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