Michal Helfman

Born in: 1973
From: Tel Aviv, Israel
Lives and works: Tel Aviv, Israel
Represented by: Sommer Contemporary Art
Website: http://www.michalhelfman.com/
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michal_Helfman

UN goals

Biography

Michal Helfman is a multidisciplinary artist working with sculpture, architecture, video and drawing. Crafting artworks combining dance and stage design, her artistic practice is known for showing the continuity between backstage and frontstage. For the artist, stages – in all their possible forms – symbolize life and time, bringing to mind William Shakespeare’s maxim “all the world’s a stage.”

Looking at Helfman’s work we cannot help but think of Edgar Degas’ obsession with stages: whether behind the scenes of a ballet or in the intimacy of a bath, Degas always played with the distinctions between public and the personal arena so as to blend them together, something found in Helfman’s artistic practice as well.

Repetition and time are other leitmotifs for the artist, and from this perspective we can see similarities with Merce Cunningham's choreographies, specially with Walkaround Time. Just like Cunningham, Helfman’s challenges hierarchies and the limits of space. Through her work she revisits history and boundaries such as frontiers, showing that despite analogies, the future remains to be written.

Career highlights

Solo shows

2020, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel: Michal Helfman: Dear A.S.A/P
2017, A Tale of A Tub, Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Running Out of History
2016, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany: Michal Helfman - Running Out Of History
2013, CCA, Tel Aviv, Israel: Michal Helfman: CHANGE
2009, Cardi Gallery, Milan, Italy: Michal Helfman