Twenty-five pairs of eyes fix their gaze on visitors as they enter Meir Sidi’s exhibition at Nulobaz Gallery. The gallery’s black-painted walls frame a sequence of pencil portrait drawings on paper—all of them Meir, yet only one is Meir Sidi.
In his current project, Sidi set out to collect, select, and draw all the Meirs he did not know, thereby expanding the imagined world of possibilities and the shared space occupied by people who bear the same name. Among them are public figures and politicians alongside ordinary individuals, poets, painters, and educators. Beneath each portrait appears the subject’s profession, and among them is a self-portrait whose listed profession is “painter.” The multiplicity of identities gathered under a single name allows the general signifier to be broken down into unique individuals, and then reassembled once again.
The portraits are drawn from photographs found online and printed in basic quality. Only a few of the subjects were personally known to the artist. What began as a somewhat playful gesture, almost a game, becomes in this series of drawings a striking metaphor for an inner journey seeking its place in the world.
Portraiture has been a central motif in Sidi’s work over the past several years. It began with portraits of friends and family members, drawn in oil pastel and then ironed onto paper. Sidi later embroidered these same portraits repeatedly, creating a series that was exhibited about two years ago at Maya Gallery in Tel Aviv. Those small, intimate embroideries laid the foundation for the large-scale drawings presented in the current exhibition, which includes nearly life-sized portraits from a much broader series that remains in continuous development.
The series resonates with the work of Elizabeth Peyton, whose practice is centered on portraiture—of friends, partners, and public figures she often knows only through photographs. Peyton’s works are characterized by vivid colors and small, intimate formats. In contrast, Sidi’s drawings are monumental in scale and rendered in black and white, resembling masks or monuments. Yet his distinctive mark-making, composed of countless short strokes, likewise creates a sense of intimacy and closeness.
Curator: Maya Cohen Levy
