Auction no. 31 Modern and Contemporary Art Tuesday, February 21, 2017 at 20:00

Born 1945, Samarkand. Moved to Israel in 1948.

Hava Gal-On is an exceptional artist. The corpus of her work extends over five decades each of which deserves contemplation in depth. She has never been part of the mainstream in local art but her oeuvre knowingly or unknowingly rubs shoulders with and is informed by it. She is like a fascinated girl adoringly contemplating the masters of art and charmingly conjuring up her own abundant display of language before them.

Her works are straightforward and colorful, their painterly perception naïve. The images are simple and overflowing with details depicting verbal and formal ornamentalism. The contents of her endeavors are related to dreaming, fantasy, spirituality and Biblical stories, including reactions to burning issues.
Hava paints using various techniques and creates works from objets trouvés. She also uses ready-mades taken from her private biographical regions (suitcases, ironing board, closet mirrors, dried-out apple tree, shoes) as well as items from the Israeli experience (jerry cans, tire strip).

Chiefly reflected in her work is her love of creativity, color and happiness. The challenges lying at the root of painting, and the painterly indecisiveness they engender, touch primarily upon the kind of simplicity derived from a rich life-craving optimistic view. Hava also paints using the fingers of her hands, thereby raising concerns regarding personal contact as the product of love touching godliness and tradition, treading upon a region, pointing at parts of the whole, etc.

In harsh reality her paintings could be perceived as unaffected charm, painting in a bubble, and lacking any continuous coherent stand. However, her adherence to the "illuminated path" whenever she describes a painting has been ever present over many decades in her oeuvre and is perceived as a stand per se.

The corpus of her wide range of work can be studied by observing ongoing processes and series she has created over the years, or by examining discontinuous parts and combining them into new bodies of work.