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“Un-contained” a solo exhibition at the  Benyamini Contemporary Ceramics Center

Curators: Reut Ravuah, Shelly Shavit




 




In the exhibition Un-contained she shows a series of works that look organic, placed on the gallery shelves they look like individual internal organs testifying their journey.  They give a feeling of injury, loss of air, containers, but the sublime glass softens and smooths the pain and Pantofaru succeeds in confusing between pain and splendor of the object/organ.  The objects are full and shiny, with wild colour that looks natural.  She says about herself that she works intuitively, unplanned, moved by emotion. “I make a base and opening.  The opening makes the vessel into a container.  I have a base and a bottom, I am stable and there is place for everyone.  Sometimes I am fed up with holding and containing everything, sometimes I want the opening to be big, I do not want pain to enter, and I do not want a bottom, I do not want to be stable”.

As the daughter of a ceramist and multi-disciplinary artist (Ruth Pantofaru 1952-2017), she grew up in a world that touched materials.  When she arrived in the Ceramic and Glass Design Department, Bezalel, she was drawn to glass blowing, a technique that unlike most materials does not allow direct contact with the material. The feeling of fear and yearning for her mother drew her to use copper wire etched into the works of this series, a material she found in the materials she inherited from her mother.

We are used to seeing glass as noble and elegant, kitschy and fragile but Rubin designs the glass without a plan and a purpose, and the sculpted objects look bold and direct. In the blowing process Rubin scars the small bubble with a loop of copper wire, adding a layer of color and material, continuing the blowing process, stretching the layers together and then releases the trapped air.  In her works Pantofaru is concerned with containment, loss and continuity, looking for material meaning and emotion by stretching the limits of glass blowing.