Gavriela Saykevitch: Sun, Stand Still at Gibeon - Solo Exhibition, Opening Reception: August 13, 2026, 7:00 PM , Tel Aviv Artists’ House , 9 Alharizi Street, Tel Aviv, Curator: Yaniv Shapira
Gavriela Saykevitch’s current body of work began almost by chance—without preparation, preliminary sketches, or any predetermined plan. It started with isolated, charged, fragmentary phrases: “The Beginning of the Process,” “Sun, Stand Still at Gibeon,” “Set Me as a Seal upon Your Heart,” and “They Shall Beat Their Swords into Plowshares.” Gradually, these fragments were transformed into a kind of automatic drawing, a visual stream of consciousness.
Written freely across sheets of paper of varying dimensions, the phrases were released from their conventional linguistic function and became visual gestures in their own right. Words ceased to operate simply as text; instead, they emerged as traces—of thought, dream, memory, or imagination.
Saykevitch recalls a moment when “my hand wandered across the paper, and what emerged felt harmonious and complete. It was like a prayer, like an act of consecration—a new sensation containing both wonder and discovery, fear and elation.”
From this experience evolved an intuitive, almost mediumistic mode of working, grounded in the unrestricted movement of the hand and in a deliberate, if partial, surrender of conscious control. Rather than beginning with an image to be realized, Saykevitch allows the work to disclose itself through the process of its making.
The works presented in this exhibition have been selected from an extensive body of work produced over the past four years—a period during which the daily practice of drawing and painting has become almost existential in character: a sustained activity of marking, erasing, writing, attaching, layering, and accumulating.
Any attempt to impose a strictly chronological or thematic order upon this body of work soon proves inadequate. The works move restlessly between image and text, between emotional eruption and meditative observation. Nevertheless, certain constellations can be discerned: works incorporating written language; others that evoke the directness of children’s drawing through recurring images of houses, suns, and trees; and still others constructed through the attachment and accumulation of fragments of paper and fabric.
Taken together, these works suggest the contours of a life journey and the traces of a complex biography. Childhood memories surface alongside layers of consciousness, insight, distress, and secrecy. Some of these layers declare themselves openly; others remain encoded, partially concealed within the work.
It is precisely in this oscillation between revelation and concealment, between the legible and the elusive, that Saykevitch’s distinctive artistic space takes shape. Drawing, writing, memory, and gesture become inseparable: not so much a record of experience as a terrain in which experience is continually rediscovered, obscured, and transformed.
Exhibition closes: September 5, 2026
Visiting Hours: Wednesday: 10:00 AM–1:00 PM, 4:00–6:00 PM, Thursday: 10:00 AM–1:00 PM, 4:00–6:00 PM,Friday: 10:00 AM–1:00 PM, Saturday: 11:00 AM–2:00 PM, Monday: 10:00 AM–1:00 PM, 4:00–6:00 PM,
Tuesday: 10:00 AM–1:00 PM, 4:00–6:00 PM
