Chronicle, 2017

“Parasite” has occupied a space that still awaits its permanent residents, in a row of future stores at the entrance to a tower rising between Neve Tzedek and the Carmel market, in tall raw-concrete rooms that open unto the street through the enormous windows. Doris Arkin’s sculpture show is parked there, in a perfect accord between the rough sculptures and the rugged space. There is so little pure sculpture, and quality sculpture at that, in contemporary Israeli art, that each show like this one is to be treasured.

Arkin’s works carries on the tradition of sculpture with its many incarnations throughout the second half of the 20th century. It is physical sculpture, which reverberates a sense of the past and something of the sculptures of Christian Boltansky, although Arkin neutralizes Boltansky’s morbidity and the residue of the Holocaust.

The past in Arkin’s sculptures is humane and poetic. It has the material force of Anselm Kiefer (his lead panels) but without the aggressive macho pomposity. She takes the (male) power and history apart, using the components to create sculptures that have their own weight and power. They possess an elusive feminine quality that pulls them into a whole, which can again be disassembled (in actuality and in the viewer’s imagination) into its components, keeping their sense of the past intact.

These are not outdoor sculptures. They need the protective womb of interior spaces. The last stage of their creation occurred within the space, taking into consideration the topography and character of the space, which contains the chronicle of the life and temporary death of each sculpture, until its reincarnation in a different time and place”.

Uzi Tzur – Art review in Haaretz, 24.3.2017