Until One Hundred and Twenty brings together the works of Rakefet Viner Omer and Assi Meshullam in an exhibition prompted, at least ostensibly, by a shared birthday and the celebration of a milestone year. Taking its title from the familiar Hebrew blessing, the exhibition follows the expression’s shifting meanings—from its biblical origins as a measure of human life to its contemporary use as a conventional birthday wish. Along this trajectory, the phrase becomes a point of departure for reflections on mortality, celebration, absurdity and the body.
Through painting, sculpture, printmaking and installation, the exhibition unfolds as a fragmented sequence of works that disrupt established systems of representation and meaning. Grotesque imagery, hybrid forms and unexpected material encounters generate a field in which contradiction is not resolved but sustained.
The thematic affinity between the two artists naturally raises the possibility of a new hybrid assembled through their works—or, as the exhibition playfully suggests, through the artists themselves. Yet hybridity here is understood not as fusion but as a condition in which distinct elements remain in dialogue while preserving their differences.
For Rakefet Viner Omer, hybridity resides as much in process as in image. Painting, printmaking and mixed media become spaces where conventional techniques dissolve into experimentation, allowing desire, intuition and material invention to reshape the language of painting. New forms emerge through acts of dismantling and reconstruction, opening possibilities that exceed what can be made alone.
Assi Meshullam approaches hybridity through sculpture, combining references drawn from tribal art, archaeology, history and contemporary image-making. His hybrid figures blur the boundaries between familiar forms without erasing their individual identities, proposing that reality itself is composed of unstable, interconnected structures rather than coherent wholes.
Until One Hundred and Twenty ultimately presents hybridity not simply as an aesthetic strategy but as a way of thinking. It is a space where bodies, materials and meanings remain open to transformation, and where the encounter between two artistic practices generates something neither entirely shared nor entirely separate.
Curator: Shlomit Broyer
