Although she’s been painting since a very young age, Hadassah Wollman’s exhibition “Night Watch”, presented last November in the Artists’ House in Tel Aviv, is her first solo exhibition. 30 years ago Wollman studied art at Washington University in the United States, but she chose to focus on literature, editing, and criticism. Until recently Wollman edited the annual literary supplement in Kol Israel, and managed to literature section at the radio. Only after leaving the radio, where she still occasionally edits programs, and started to work at the studio of artist Maya Cohen-Levi in Tel Aviv, did Wollman find time to work on her painting. The paintings in the exhibition, oil on canvas, are comprised of collages that the artist salvaged from magazines, advertisements, and other paper products. From the small paper segments, Wollman mainly constructs night scenes, an urban nocturne. In the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition, Wollman said that “the paintings are a selection from a body of work created during a period of three years, a time of discoveries and frustrations, deciphering and concealment, search and loss, a period where the world was created from the broken pieces. I disassembled and destroyed, I invested in deconstructing, and then found a place that I searched for a long time, a place from which to see and graze until forever, or at least in the meanwhile.” On “night watch” wrote the artist and poet Mordechai Geldman: “Hadassah Wollman’s night landscapes salvage the ordinary and banal in the urban landscape and make it into images of beauty that provoke inspiration and the presence of magic.”
