Artspace Tel Aviv | עמותת 'מקום לאמנות' בקרית המלאכה

Tamar Roded Shabtay

My work uses different techniques to study the internal body and understand the depths of what lies beneath the surface of the skin. My painting skills are used to mimic scientific methods designed to reflect the inner body, as I penetrate through and reveal my discoveries- various fluids, marks and textures that spread out, emanate and absorb throughout the surface. Additionally, I create images of bodies in the midst of extreme physical effort. As they maintain a physically strenuous pose, the intensity of the bodily event is amplified and opens a small slit into the inside world.

Many internally physiological activities are autonomous, functioning without the owner of the body knowing anything about them. In order to gain knowledge about the goings-on inside the body, one has to seek the aid of science and medicine: X-Ray radiography that pierces through the soft tissue of the flesh and reaches the hard construction; scanning devices that disseminate the body and enable the visualisation of blood vessels, bones and tissue, not to mention procedures such as dissection, medical imaging, sample procedures and breeding.

Usually the body lies still during medical examinations. The figures in my own work appear as though parts of their body are under a scanning device. Even so, they are not passive, rather they perform different postures through which their awareness flows to their finest threads and allows them to float above the surface. I watch things happen as if I were looking at a coral reef, the organic body changing, growing, withering, rejuvenating and degenerating. As the painting stands for a moment of intermission, it allows me to closely inspect without any time restrictions, the state of diving deep within. 

I paint on paper and study its characteristics- the colour and texture, the delicately penetrable thinness as it hangs on miniscule pins- these features remind me of skin. The paper absorbs the liquid and the images created upon it, as if it were a petri dish, a breeding ground for marks and images that portray the inner body experience.

I create images of organisms, body parts and figures of fantastic physiology that dissolve the membrane, the thin delicate skin separating the inside from the outside world. I dissect the body and reassemble a penetrable, transparent, elastic, fluid and physically boundless body.  Each body I create exposes a particular physical and emotional inner body phenomenon.

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tamarroded@gmail.com    /    www.tamarroded-shabtay.com

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052-3099952 / Studio: Kibutz Galauyot 45, 4th floor.

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