Space Network News Jerusalem-based news website highlighting positive and inspiring stories & news

“Rapture of the Senses” – Hadass Shelgman, Solo Exhibition

Hadass Shelgman began exhibiting her work as early as her student years in creative photography, in the

early 1970s, with a solo exhibition at a gallery in Leicester Square, London. About a decade later, already on another continent (the USA/California), she discovered thick industrial black paper—an earthy, tar-like material—with which she found a shared language for creating a private visual vocabulary and for developing a unique, personal painting technique. This technique involves deep incisions into paper entirely covered with oil paint, creating a richly varied, almost three-dimensional pictorial surface.

Much like photography, Shelgman’s painterly art is based on composition and on the arrangement of

elements on the surface in terms of subject matter, lines, colors, and light. The many elements organize themselves on the surface into a perfect composition and natural balance, guiding the viewer’s eye toward the powerful emotional and narrative message that characterizes her work. In her words:
“Sometimes I create according to a specific subject or idea, and sometimes according to what simply emerges. Everything is very fluid and very spontaneous. The whole issue of composition and the placement of images on the paper comes to me very naturally—probably from photography.”

Hadass Shelgman has lived a life full of journeys across continents—on foot, by boat, in jeeps, and by airplane—without fear and without limitations, and all of this is reflected in the artworks presented in the exhibition. Influences from the art of Papua New Guinea and Africa are evident, as well as from South American art and the Indigenous cultures of Australia. Imagery inspired by tribal masks and sculptures from around the world finds expression on sheets of tar paper densely packed with details. The subjects and scenes arise from the psyche, from the body, and from within outward. Nude human figures with large, emphasized genitalia protrude into the pictorial space; figures of aliens and robots—part human, part machine; real and imaginary animals; terrifying insects; gods and goddesses from ancient mythologies and myths; trees, plants, and wild nature that fills every corner of the paper.

The scenes are numerous and diverse, unfolding simultaneously. Figures mate; women grow out of trees; fossil-like figures float around; and in a parallel scene, a figure that is perhaps a woman, perhaps a queen, perhaps a goddess gazes upon a miniature underwater world. An ancient past blends with a mad future and a chaotic present to create a dizzying bacchanalia that calls upon the viewer to surrender without fear and enter a world of imagined dream that is both chaotic and real. The impossible merges with the existing; harsh contemporary messages mingle with dreamlike softness. The viewer dives into the dream and inward into the works, moving through them as if they were their own, experiencing and feeling what unfolds as though physically present within all the events.

Recently, Hadass Shelgman has begun painting with acrylics on cotton paper and canvas. The atmosphere in these works is calmer, more serene and dreamlike, and the imagery is primarily the result of her observation of what is happening outside—in nature and among the people around her.

Throughout her artistic journey, Hadass Shelgman has been engaged with life itself—her inner and outer life, and that of all of us. Her gaze is sharp, uncompromising, powerful, exposing, harsh and tender at once, driven by an unyielding passion to reveal and show everything: all the shades and all the complexity—the ugly and the beautiful, the animalistic, the deviant, the upright, the delicate, the predator and the prey, the hidden and the revealed, order and chaos—the totality of the entire world. The viewer cannot ignore it, cannot hide. Everything is laid bare before them, compelling them to dive inward, into their own body and into their soul.

Global Art Gallery

Curated by: Dr. Galia Duhin Arieli & Michali Adler

Exhibition dates: February 3 – March 5, 2026

Opening reception: Saturday, February 7, 2026, at 12:00 PM