Recent Works
Dubi Harel Artist Statement
My work is figurative, and I draw and paint from the starting point of observation. I am an obsessives sketcher, and my favorite topic has always been people. At a certain point I was influenced by artists who did “political” works. I felt that the world I was born into and values I was raised on are slowly disappearing, and I (like most of us) do nothing to promote a change, or at least to protest what is happening in this world at large and more specifically here in Israel.
At that point I challenged myself to use my skill set to describe visually the famous statement: “Rearranging the chairs on the Deck of the Titanic”, that I thought is describing succinctly many of the processes happening in our time. I created a series of prints of a large passenger ship, which is used as a main stage and as an axis propagating a tragicomic predictable course of events. Following that series, in the project I have been working on for the last seven years I used other images to describe the same scenario. In particular, I use a nuclear mushroom as an icon of the end of the world. The atomic mushroom image is used as a backstage to the little dramas I create, which contain references to famous scenes from the history of art, and sometimes distortions of the original scenes.
The somewhat cumbersome name I gave to the series is a paraphrase to a song by Shalom Hanoch: “What Do You Do When You Wake Up and See the End of the World on the Horizon? Answer: the Same Tings Exactly". Or in a nutshell, if you wish: “The End of the World – a User Manual”
