Bio
Dana Harel (born in Tel Aviv, 1986),
is a visual artist living and working in Kibbutz Hatzor, Israel.
Harel holds a BA in Art and Culture from Sapir College’s School of Visual Arts, Sderot, and a Art Teaching Certificate from the Faculty of Arts, Hamidrasha at Beit Berl College.
Harel has had shows at Chelouche Gallery, Tel Aviv; the Sapir Contemporary Art Gallery, Sderot; The White Gallery, Minus One Gallery, and in Fresh Paint Art Fair, Tel Aviv; and Arie Klang House Artists Gallery, Ashdod.
Artist Statement
The appearance of my artwork is a landscape built from different layers.
These layers have independent representation, but the final image will always emphasize their relation. In the first layer of analysis, I explore the basic formalism of the image – charmed by the beauty of the shapes and the way they are created. In the second layer, I dismantle the representation process and examine how images are created, in relation to the medium I work on.
The landscape itself acts both as the medium and as raw material, with whom
I work and re-design while guiding myself by reflexive thoughts.
During the creation process, I come out of the image’s natural environment and try to follow phenomena that fascinate me, but at the same time, I represent them in a new sterile and aesthetic environment, which cannot be recreated. I involve different fields such as art and science and examine the objects and the materials they are made of. This allows me to create new images and completely detach them from their natural environment.
In my creations, I use industrial materials, mainly from the construction industry. The roughness of these materials and their unique compound makes them an integral part of the process. My creation technique relies mainly on body movement, occasionally aggressive, that end when the image stops, on its own, or alternatively when I decide to capture a specific image by interrupting the flow of the paint on the surface.
The entanglement narrative, the limited control on a newly created image, temporary elements such as weather, wind and ground movement, structural formations in nature and organisms – All together guide me when I extract a shape out of a phenomenon.