Eti Jacobi

Eti Jacobi studied art at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, as well as classics and philosophy at Tel Aviv University.

She has been exhibiting her work since 1981 and is currently teaching at the Midrasha – Faculty of Arts at Beit Berl College and in Bezalel Academy for Art and Design, Jerusalem.

Over the last forty years, Jacobi has been a prominent figure in the Israeli art landscape and her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and has been included in many group exhibitions.

In her body of work Jacobi has been tirelessly pursuing an impossible mission: decoding the oldest visual language in human history by questioning many of the medium’s constitutive distinctions – abstraction vs. figuration, monumentality vs. intimacy, technical proficiency vs. artistic freedom, creation vs. appropriation and tradition vs. innovation.

In the last ten years, this quest has brought her to an extreme position, embodied in a unique series of works in which a multitude of paint layers is applied on large square canvases. Starting from the simple, and yet pivotal fact, that these works cannot be photographed – they can only be experienced physically – Jacobi’s work puts at stake our very understanding of art.

In parallel to this virtuous path, Jacobi started to bring to the fore – mainly through the language of drawing – a figurative vocabulary that is as far from her main practice as it is perfectly complementary to it.

Witty and nonchalant, these works are the conceptual translations of the so-called “preparatory drawings” we all know from the history of art, although here they first of all ‘prepare’ the artist to perform her acrobatic brushstrokes as well as to warm up the eye of the viewer for her challenging and yet beautiful polychromatic compositions.