The Negev Museum of Art is honored to present Avishai Platek’s Theater of Nature. In his debut museum show, the artist unfolds a comprehensive view of the local landscape as a theatrical stage, challenging the conventional perception of nature. Avishai Platek (b. 1975, Kibbutz Nahshonim) graduated from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, including a period as an exchange student at London’s Central Saint Martins, and from the advanced studies program of HaMidrasha School of Art, Beit Berl College. Platek specializes in painting, drawing, and printmaking, and throughout his diverse career, he has also worked with photography, video, and performance. However, regardless of medium, the local landscape has always been at the heart of his artistic practice. To a large degree, Platek is a landscape painter. And yet, it is important to note that the landscapes in his paintings do not hinge on the horizon but rather offer us close-ups of the landscape. A flower, a shrub, one or a couple of trees, a scarecrow, a wild animal, a structure, a streetlight – these are the main characters in his paintings, as if the landscape were a protagonist, and the artist – a portrait painter. And so, it would be more apt to describe him as “a painter of landscape portraits.” Indeed, by utilizing psychological mechanisms like anthropomorphism and pareidolia, in his generous and stylized paintings, Platek transforms the configurations of nature into human figuration in a series of gestures, glances, and emotional expressions. Imbuing the plant kingdom with a humanlike energy allows for a more intimate relationship between humans and nature (and landscape), conjuring drama that takes shape and plays out in front of us – a “theater of nature.” The individual walks in nature. He knows the mythology of nature; he is familiar with the legacy of ideologies that have been embedded in it (whether disavowing or sharing them); and he knows about the wars, the burdens, and the costs. But the individual who walks in nature also remembers its wonders, reflecting wistfully on the realms of his childhood. Platek’s work touches on our complex and multifaceted relationship with landscape, as well as his personal experiences from recent years between the two peripheries – his home on Kibbutz Kabri, from which he had to evacuate, and the Negev, where the war started – and at the same time, challenges the prevailing perceptions of the local landscape through its personification. Platek creates nature perceived as a subjective, singular, present, vital, and sentient being that responds to a viewer in his image; a theatrical landscape that blends reality (realism) with the fictional (surrealism). The artist does not propose nature as a sanctuary or mere decoration, but as an entity. In Avishai Paltek’s Theater of Nature, there is no neutral backdrop but a living presence that has its own gestures, situations, and states of consciousness. No longer serving as a background – the landscape is a human encounter. Curator: Ron Bartos