Shlomo Katz’s paintings are inhabited by slender figures moving among trees, animals, flames, rocks and birds. Suspended between movement and stillness, they seem to hover rather than stand, maintaining a delicate balance as they inhabit a poetic world where cultures, periods and traditions meet. Medieval manuscripts, Byzantine icons, Persian miniatures, Art Nouveau and East Asian calligraphy all echo through his visual language, creating images that feel both timeless and uncannily familiar.
Born in Łódź in 1938, Katz immigrated to Israel after the Second World War and grew up in Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek. The rupture of his childhood never appears in his paintings as direct testimony. Instead, it becomes an underlying force that shapes a persistent search for beauty, order and grace. His paintings do not escape reality; they respond to it by constructing worlds in which memory, myth and imagination coexist.
The exhibition focuses on works from the final years of Katz’s life, in which his paintings become lighter, more spacious and increasingly luminous. Refined lines, open compositions and radiant gold backgrounds dissolve conventional perspective, allowing the figures to exist between the earthly and the spiritual. Drawing on the tradition of medieval icon painting, gold is not used simply to depict light but to become light itself, suspending time and transforming the painting into a poetic territory where reality and imagination, memory and hope, are held together.
The exhibition takes its title from one of Katz’s late commissions for the chapel of the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado, where he was invited to create a series of paintings around three themes: Flight, Justice and Grace. Decades later, these three words resonate with renewed urgency. In Katz’s work, flight is not an act of conquest but of vulnerability and imagination. Justice is understood not as certainty but as the delicate balance between opposing forces. Grace emerges as an ethical gesture that reaches beyond judgment, acknowledging human fragility while insisting on the possibility of compassion.
At a time when the ground beneath us often feels unstable, Katz’s paintings remind us that balance is never a fixed condition but an ongoing human practice of attentiveness, adjustment and faith. Through this exhibition, we hope to return Katz’s work to the conversation—not only as an overlooked chapter in Israeli art, but as a timely reflection on how beauty can respond to rupture, how imagination can remain grounded in reality, and how grace and justice might continue to shape the way we inhabit the world.
Curators: Yifat Giladi | Rakefet Viner Omer
