About

Inbal Hoffman

Born in 1973. Graduated with honors from the Department of Visual Communication, Bezallel Jerusalem (1998). Artist, illustrator and designer, Engaged in a wide range of subjects and mediums from gardening and video installation to the use of more traditional disciplines such as photography and sculpture, while constantly trying to melt remote techniques and mediums, creating encounters between traditional forms of work and industrial, organic and natural, digital and line.
Her works expresses aesthetic pleasure, meticulousness and preciseness. Uses diverse means of expression, techniques and systematic thought process in her dealings with order over entropy.
held 3 solo exhibition and participated in group exhibitions and various projects in galleries and Museum both home and abroad.

Statement

At the heart of my work is the search for the touch points between the two- and the three-dimensional. For me, drawing and illustration are dominant tools through which I turn thoughts into images, and then transform the drawing into a real object. I always move across an extensive spectrum of media – photography, video, sculpture, drawing, installation and gardening – creating meeting points between traditional forms of work and technology and digitization, between organic and artificial nature. In recent years, I have been building Dadaist sculptural environments that are made of simple, everyday objects that are readily available, banal and totally lacking in artistic finery. The objects were selected from the jumble that piles up at home, from the outskirts of the city, or from high street pound stores and IKEA too. The use of cheap materials or found objects is charged with biographical facets, both private and public. Items that are clearly local connect the work to Israeli culture and to the complex consumerism of our existence (global versus local, old versus new). The raw materials collected and brought into the studio range from household utensils, laboratory apparatuses, cleaning materials, plastic toys, work tools, second-hand books, stationery, through to plants, roots, shoots or molds. All become “actors” in the everyday environment and respond to the new uses I bestow on them. My work arises from an overflowing and eclectic reservoir of materials and images that I use to construct an environment that is rather slapstick in spirit. It is full of inventions and mismatched, amusing and unexpected connections. The objects that make up the environment are characterized by ingenuity, improvisation, humor, playfulness and logic, dotted with kinks and curve balls, but always personified with an experience of aesthetic pleasure, meticulousness and workmanship. Randomness adds value to my creative processes, as well as to questions of control versus a lack of it. Working with living/organic material (especially for botanic and plant shoot installations), I have often had to give up my need to tame or control processes, choosing instead to turn myself into a conduit that processes information and leaves room for random occurrences or even errors, without diminishing the aesthetic values of the work. To me, sculptural space is like a playground. It mixes high and low, ready-made and makers, tension and movement, personal emotion and collective memory. It is a deceptive space, composed of materials that are so familiar and commonplace that they evoke in us a sense of identity, a smile and even compassion while, in contrast, something in the absurdity of the connections leads to skepticism, or makes us see the mechanism as suspect. What had appeared to be systematically organized turns out to be disorderly, and even chaotic. Using different techniques and practices, I try to catch something of the wonder of creation, whether by deconstructing units and reassembling them into organic structures, or by constantly searching for the grid that lies at the heart of things. In order to create an environment that is essentially chaotic, I research the structure or the method of the system, and only then allow myself to disrupt and destroy it.

Selected Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions and special projects
2018 'Flash Drive’- solo exhibition, Alfred Cooperative Institute for Art & Culture, Tel Aviv (Curator: Tali Ben Nun)
2017 'Cart of curiosities'- installation, Art Dusseldorf, BLOOOM Award by WARSTEINER special exhibition, Dusseldorf
2017 'Bone grafting 2'- site specific installation (commissioned project) Bloomfield Science Museum, Jerusalem
2017 'Bone grafting'- site specific installation, special project / Fresh paint Art fair 9, Tel Aviv (Curator: Tali Ben Nun)
2015 'Death of the garden gnome'-solo exhibition, Rehovot Municipal Gallery, Rehovot (Curator: Ora kraus)
2015 'Incubator' - Video Projection, Joyce Yehuda Gallery, Montreal, Canada
2014 'Headrest' for 'One' Art book by 'Imago Mundi' foundation on behalf of Luciano Benetton / (curator: Naomi Aviv)
2013 'seedbed' – solo exhibition, P8 gallery, Tel Aviv (Curator: Naomi Aviv)
2002 'Dollhouse Delinquency'-Solo exhibition, Ori and Rami Nehustan, Museum (Curators: Ruth Shadmon & Naomi Aviv)

Group Exhibitions
2018 'The Soap Cry’– group exhibition – Gallery on the cliff, Netalya (Curator: Guy Morag)
2018 'soft worlds'– group exhibition – Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (Curator: Sarah Raiman Shor)
2018 'Avatar'– group exhibition – Royal Beach hotel, Tel Aviv (Curator: Sharon Tuval)
2017 'What gose around comes around' – group exhibition - Schechter gallery, Tel Aviv (Curator: Shira Friedman)
2017 '1D2D3D' – group exhibition – B.Y5 gallery, Tel Aviv (Curator: Nir Harmat)
2017 'What is up what is down' – group exhibition – Jewish biennale, Jerusalem (Curator: Gabi Yair)
2017 'Gomly Data' – group exhibition – Hansen house, Jerusalem (Curator: Ilanit Conopny Tali Kayam)
2017 'On the edge' Israeli Paper – group exhibition – Eerets Israel Museum, Tel Aviv (Curator: Anat Getenye)
2016 '100 years of Dada'– group exhibition – Yanko Dada Museum, Ein Hod (Curator: Raaya Zomer)
2016 'Platforms' - group exhibition –WIZO Haifa Academic Center Gallery, Haifa (Curator: Anat Getenyu)
2016 'Sherover villa: Jerusalem design week' - group exhibition – Hansen house, Jerusalem (Curator: Saron Paz)
2016 'Universum' International Photography Festival, Jaffa - group exhibition – Jaffa (Curator: Sharon Tuval)
2016 'Domestication' - group exhibition - Alfred Gallery, Tel Aviv (Curator: Hagar Brill)
2016 'As if there is a place'- group exhibition - Artspace Tel-Aviv, Tel Aviv, (Curator: Nir Harmrt)
2016 'Heaven and earth' - group exhibition - Ilana Gur Museum, Jaffa (Curator: Nir Harmrt)
2016 ' Imago Mundi exhibition ' Pratt Institute in Brooklyn - group exhibition – NY (Curator: Naomy Aviv)
2016 'In the adjacent field'- group exhibition - Studio dieci, Vercelli, Italy
2015 'Bio design: Hybrid fabrication' - group exhibition – HIT Gallery, Holon,
2015 'Art Souterrain" - group exhibition – World trade center, Montreal, Canada (Curator: Carmit Blumenzon)
2014 'Standing Still" - group exhibition – Drefler gallery, Musrrarra, Jerusalem
2014 'Epidermis' - group exhibition – Florentin art space, Tel Aviv (Curator: Gilat Nadivi)
2014 'Animal, Vegetable, Still Life' - group exhibition, train Station, Kfar Yehoshua (Curator: Neta Haber)
2014 'Common Ground' - group exhibition - P8 gallery, Tel Aviv
2014 'Woven Consciousness' - Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv (Curator: Irena Gordon)
2014 'Blue Grass' - group exhibition - Borohov house, Mishmar Hanegev
2014 'Embedded in the material' - group exhibition - Florentin art space, Tel Aviv (Curator: Gilat Nadivi)
2013 'magia naturalis' – group exhibition - P8 gallery, Tel Aviv (Curator: Dr Yochay Rozen)
2013 'Metropolin' ,group exhibition, Hanina gallery, Tel Aviv
2003 'Hallo, Booba', group exhibition – Yad le Banim, Ranana
2001 'Men in the house', CCA gallery, Tel-Aviv (Curator: Naomy Aviv)
1999 'Dolls', The Israel Museum Youth Wing, Jerusalem.
1999 'Big Clock' center piece, 'It's Time'-group exhibition, youth wing of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Awards and Grants:
2018 -The Yehoshua Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts
2018 -The Keshet Award for Contemporary Art- (12 selected nominees)
2017 - BLOOOM AWARD BY WARSTEINER (top 10 finalists)
2015 -The Yehoshua Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts
2012 - First Place, Design Competition, The Jim Henson Company
2002 - The Pais Council for Culture and the Arts, grant for solo exhibition
1998 – Sandberg Prize Bezalel
1998 - Excellence Award for Academic Achievement
1997 - Excellence Award for Academic Achievement
1997 - Yossi Stern Award
1995 - Excellence Award for Academic Achievement