We are pleased to announce that artist Shay Zilberman is the recipient of the Ann & Ari Rosenblatt Prize for Visual Art in Israel, 2021. Intended to support and promote Israeli artists active in various media, the prize is awarded for the sixth time in collaboration with the Tel Aviv Artists' House.
Prize committee: Galia Bar-Or, art scholar and curator; Aya Lurie, director and chief curator, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art; Dalit Matatyahu, senior curator of Israeli art, Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Arie Berkowitz, director and chief curator, Tel Aviv Artists' House; Orly Hoffman, prize initiator and curator of the prize exhibitions; Ann and Ari Rosenblatt, prize donors.
Shay Zilberman lives and works in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, to which he returned after a long sojourn in Europe. His artistic practice is centered on manual collage - a modernist technique that serves him as a fundamental mechanism and modus operandi. In his collage works, Zilberman weaves culture, nature, and man together, creating a stratified world which oscillates between the personal and the collective, using paper and scissors. He breathes life into the surface, infusing the work with volume to spawn a breathing, vibrating work that responds to the cutting motions.
Zilberman culls memories. He extracts his work materials from written texts: travel and history books, texts about art and politics, as well as old notebooks, architectural blueprints, office documents, and similar materials found in markets or redeemed from the ash heaps of history. Drawing his inspiration from these finds, which function as an inexhaustible, endless repository for research and creation, he combines them with neither hierarchy nor reference to place, language, borders, or agenda.
In addition to paper, Zilberman uses various other materials, such as textile, and diverse techniques, including printmaking and sculpture. His work constantly changes, expanding its boundaries as it evolves and redefining itself each time anew.