HADASS SHLAGMAN

HADASS SHLAGMAN | NAMMU

*Nammu – A mythological Sumerian mother, the most ancient documented in history, c. 3500 B.C. Nammu is the mother who gives birth to heaven and earth and the creator of all things. The primal mother. She represents a warm and accepting female deity.

HADASS SHLAGMAN | NAMMU

“My art reflects my life in an expressive tribal primitive surrealistic style, connecting me with powerful spirits, dreams, imaginative and mystical fantasy. Celebrities of different genders and naked bodies are happily floating in space, sexual acts as banal everyday activities in a contemporary shifting digital world of virtual reality and artificial intelligence.”
Hadass Shlagman

In her paintings, Hadass Shlagman strips away the layer of external fat that constitutes Western beauty concepts – or whatever remains of them – and engraves her desires into black tarpaper. There is neither time nor air on or on the work platform. The externalized naked figures with open vaginas, the giant penis, and massive breasts, resonate with each other, creating harmony. At first glance, it looks as if it were drawn on a thick fabric extracted from the earth, a fascinating prehistoric artifact.

After spending some twenty years in Australia, and countless journeys to remote parts of the globe, a fascinating chapter in its own right, Shlagman magnifies the visual and non-conceptual innocence seared in her mind.
In her series of paintings, “Nammu,” she expresses her personal vision of how the world should look. It is an idealized version of a private reality with elements of primitive drawing and even “bad painting elements.” Painting that encompasses grotesque caricature, wildness, and humor, out of conscious choice and maturity.

Shlagman adopts a pagan ritualistic process in service of her art. In this ritualistic presentation, which maintains its essential quality as belonging to the present, she conveys to the viewer a spectacular position of strength of unbridled sexuality, of sex as a natural behavior – artistry in the world of art. Her painting is devoid of tension between the masculine and feminine.

Both have strong and blatant visibility, with male sexual organs attached to naked women, and everyone coronated, together or separately, with crowns, suns, leaves, and erect spears. In a sign language with the quality of etching, modernity features are densely engraved: tanks, airplanes, boats, guns, and robots, along with mythical creatures, skeletons, a kangaroo, and a bull, insects and toxic centipedes, and trees, and various predatory plants: easily identifiable iconography, signs of reality and imagination.
Most prominent of all is the great mother, she who created all things. She gave birth to heaven and earth and to all the other goddesses.
The colorwork has primordial qualities.
There is a blood-red background and an indigo blue background with elusive mystical qualities.
Blue served as a spice for artists from ancient times to the present, from blue gems in Afghanistan through the scarf of the Girl with the Pearl Earring. The turmeric yellow in the works is the same as the background of cave drawings. Hadass Shlagman engraves her figures on hidden walls of new caves. And like the hunters in those ancient cave drawings, her engraving also expresses a personal war wound that suffers no roundness or gentleness.

The exhibit “Nammu” presents Shlagman’s ten latest works. They are all oil paint on tarpaper. From her studio in Australia and now in Tel Aviv she continues engaging with the subject of the power of woman, adding another link to the chain of feminist painters from the Middle Ages and Renaissance whose work was not duly appreciated, and who were perceived as aggressive and threatening to the status of men.

Read the Full Article on Art Market Magazine Issue #49