In this exhibition, the artist and stage designer, Tatia Gogati Shohet, born in Georgia, where she graduated with honors from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, presents a series of paintings and drawings in oil, acrylic, and oil-based felt tips in red, turquoise, green and black. The works are full of passion, wildness, and death. Main motifs include female genitals and the pomegranate fruit, a traditional Jewish symbol of femininity, reproduction, and multiplicity. Other pronounced motifs in Gogati Shohet’s paintings are female nudity, surgical instruments and sewing tools, chunks of flesh, slaughtered lambs, cuts, wounds, genitals, and bleeding organs. 

  The artist finds inspiration for her paintings in images of urogynecology surgeries, a field that combines urology and gynecology. Detected also are references to the 1969 film The Color of Pomegranates (Armenian: Nřan guynə) by the Georgian-Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990). Also present is a childhood memory – of a pomegranate tree that stood in the yard of her grandmother’s Georgian village house and which due to cold temperatures produced red flowers, but never fruit.

   In her work process, Gogati Shohet isolates frames from videos of surgical procedures which she then sketches in detail. At the heart of her painting practice lies the belief in a link between the movement of the hands that cut, stitch, slaughters, or conduct (a choir) and that of her own hands. To a large extent, she transforms the movements she records with the movements of the paintbrush, the paint, the pencil. The artist reforms the dreadful frames by turning them into spectacular images, visions dreamt in blue and red. Gogati Shohet revitalizes the cold and violent scenes as she turns them into a poetics of striking, expressive colors.  

   Moreover, the works that Gogati Shohet paints from the photographed close-ups allow us to think about her work process as the creation of a feminine space teeming with life, which stands as a negative to those tools of incision and stitching, conducting, and playing that appear in the paintings. In her hands, these violent acts become actions full of life and a poetics of compassion and mercy. At the center of it all is the womb, as a productive organ, which returns to its basic image – the source of human life. The artist succeeds in creating her unique imagery in the field of contemporary Israeli art. 

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The Color of Pomegranate / Credits

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Curator: Ori Drumer

Graphic Design: Avihai Mizrahi

Photography: Daniel Sheriff and Tal Nisim

Text Editing: Shoey Raz

English Translation: Sivan Raveh

Set up: Gili Natan

Production: Yaniv Lachman