In the exhibition “I Can’t Control My Hands” Nomi Tannhauser displays oil paintings, plasticine works, drawings and a video film (photographed and edited by Yoav Raban) created over the past two years, which all utilize the self-portrait as an artistic action as well as an emotional process. Her oeuvre encompasses the challenge of feminine identity and the internal and external forces that operate on it – forces of revealing and hiding, compulsion and breaking through, exposure and limitation. The show is a semi-confession booth at the same time as a stormy unrestrained scene of action. The boundaries of dress and body are under constant examination while the attire succeeds the body, covers and beautifies it, and serves as an aware and subconscious space that separates between the outside and the inside, between the self and the other.

Nomi describes her art as an inseparable part of her daily battle concept with the self; with what is part of it and what lays outside: “To remove the border, to shove it out, to take a risk, not to remain only within the ‘safety zone’ - this is what unites dealing with driving anxiety and the challenge of exposing the body to painting in the nude. The fragile, exposed, frightened body which is always there under the clothes, when I’m driving as well as in any social or artistic interaction, the body that wants to take place but is afraid of the consequences....”

In the exhibition Tannhauser creates an artistic and emotional symposium when she invites Pesach Slabosky and Debbie Margalit as guest artists. They exhibit portraits – drawings and oils – that were executed in the past year during weekly meetings between the three, when they portrayed each other dressed and in the nude. The artists’ monologue turns into a “brain storm” on the nature of observation on parallel and intersecting points of view and on the scope of the painterly gesture that moves between hyper-realism, expressionism and abstraction.

 

Irena Gordon, December 2014