Yossi Waxman, Class Picture

Poets and Other Birds

The exhibition “Class Picture” by writer, artist and designer Yossi Waxman, on display on the wall at the Entrance Gallery, features portraits of ten of the most outstanding and influential poets and writers in Hebrew literature and poetry. The installation includes iconic cultural heroes who are no longer with us. Some lived to a ripe old age, while others died under tragic circumstances: Yosef Haim Brenner, Rachel the Poetess, Hayim Nahman Bialik, Leah Goldberg, Avraham Shlonsky, Zelda (in her youth and as a mature woman), Yona Wallach (in her youth and as a mature woman), Hezy Leskly, Dahlia Ravikovitch and Hanoch Levin.

Waxman has designed each portrait in the form of an icon of a secular saint and has positioned the image of a bird native to the land of Israel next to each one. Each bird represents an attribute of the images of these poets and writers. Waxman has matched a specific bird (wagtail, hoopoe, jay and others) to each portrait to correspond to the artist’s world of content or based on a ideological connection reflecting the artist’s personality. For example, the crow pecking at Brenner’s forehead symbolizes the writer’s difficulties in making decisions. Waxman chooses the wagtail, the first bird he encountered as a child, to depict Rachel, one of the first Hebrew poets. Birds have varying meanings in different cultures. Here the birds add additional levels of meaning to the portraits of these artists, symbolizing physical and spiritual flight, the psyche, the soul, the imagination, transience and wanderings. In Jewish sources the bird symbolizes the Shekhinah or presence of God, and in Christianity the dove symbolizes the divine spirit.

In the “Class Picture” exhibition, Waxman brings together his two creative worlds: writing and painting. In expressive and dramatic paintings Waxman uses stormy and powerful brush strokes of thick acrylic paint to create his portraits of these artists from different generations. Through these portraits Waxman produces a nostalgic and touching picture of the land of Israel as it once was but is no more.

Waxman ties the different portraits together by means of a frame story of an imaginary class of his childhood heroes and their cultural heritage. The artist describes these revered intellectuals using his picturesque language: “This is a class picture of our deceased forebears: Bialik is the principal with his lovely bird on his head, Brenner is the literature teacher with his crow beside him, Ravikovitch with her jay is the class beauty and Goldberg with the 'eagle-owl that comes in the night' is the vice-principal…”

Rina Genussov

Exhibition Curator