Sigalit landau's exhibition is a powerful occurrence in several chapters spreading throughout the museum halls and the adjacent garden. It holds new as well as earlier works, some not previously displayed in Israel; a remarkable weave of life stories and memoirs with sculpted images, movement and sound.

Landau (b. 1969, Jerusalem) is the most prominent and prolific artist in the Israeli contemporary art field. Right upon graduating from Bezalel Art Academy in 1994 she aroused interest in a number of group exhibitions as well as in her solo show the following year at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. During the last decade her Tel Aviv exhibitions won public acclaim and became landmark events in Israeli Art. Landau is sought-out by major galleries and museums world-wide. In 2011 she was the Israeli representative to the Venice biennale.

Landau’s exhibition in the Negev Museum of Art unveils her recent and largest sculpture to date, prior to its display in France. It is a bronze cast of an abandoned shelter from  southern  Tel Aviv, extracted from its original location, standing heroically in disequilibrium.

The Shelter corresponds, also maintaining a visual link, to installations on the second floor of the museum, where the artist created a homely environments as if drawn from times gone by. In the Kitchen, voices of Four Mothers coming to us from the oven bring to life memories of survival, work, motherhood, songs and cooking. In the Living Room next door, the story of an eternally young man is added to those of the elderly women. Fragments from his diaries expose his feelings and torments. Through the window an olive tree is seen, moving in a noisy tremble – a piece of nature, a symbol and part of  modern agriculture.

The female body – the mythic and the real – beautiful and vulnerable – is strongly present in the ground floor. Like her figures, Landau’s materials provide a scope of sensations and meanings: marble and salt, bronze and newspaper – the eternal and the perishable, the simple and the precious. Additional components, more personal ones, are added in this exhibition to the bridges Landau builds through her art, past to future, private to collective. At their core is the experience of orphan-hood and motherhood.