Noa Kurnick is a painter and installation artist. She is a 2022 graduate of the Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A) program at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem.
Zvi Tolkovsky has been active in the Israeli art scene since the 1960s and is considered one of the country's most prominent artists today.
אל שם | EL SHAM | الشام
A Joint Exhibition by Zvi Tolkovsky and Noa Kurnick
Curators: Lital Marcus Morin and Reut Yeshayahu
14.2.25 - 26.3.25
The exhibition ‘El Sham’ emerged from a series of recent meetings held in Zvi Tolkovsky’s studio in the heart of Jerusalem. It marks a pinnacle in the collaborative work of Tolkovsky and Kurnick, which began years ago, bridging the space between Israel and the Czech Republic.
The exhibition’s title is drawn from a painting by Tolkovsky of the same name, exploring the question of the subject’s placement within a cultural and geographical space devoid of clear meaning or rootedness. Within this undefined space, ‘El Sham’ serves as a fleeting anchor — an agreed-upon fiction, part of a collective destiny of living in a place that at times feels like nowhere.
The words themselves create a world, but it is a world built on verbal constructs upheld by momentary consensus — a reality as easily dismantled as it is formed. Language is not stable; it operates in a realm where cultural structures transcend their literal meaning and transform into material.
The tension between the written word and the visual image — between the signifier and the signified — is an ongoing dialogue in Tolkovsky’s work. The written word becomes a creation in itself, a transformation from the verbal to the visual, a process in which letters take on volume, materiality, and vibration.
Kurnick’s methods often grapple with transience. She creates works from materials with inherently short lifespans, like the sand sculptures featured in this exhibition. The ephemerality of these sculptures, juxtaposed with Tolkovsky’s paintings, hints at fleeting moments of meaning — something that cannot be fully grasped yet remains impossible to ignore.
Between the artist and the painter unfolds an intergenerational dialogue, addressing existence within an ever-shifting reality. It is an unstable, elusive space — between word and image, between transient and historical material — existing by its very nature or conjured from nothingness.