About — Matti Harel

MATTI HAREL

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Born in 1974, Israel
Lives and works in Tel Aviv–Jaffa
Senior Lecturer, Shenkar Academy of Art
Co-director, Gallery Har-El / Har-El Printers & Publishers

Matti Harel is an artist based in Tel Aviv–Jaffa. Working primarily through painting and image-making, his practice is concerned with the unstable life of images: the ways they are remembered, reproduced, displaced, obscured and transformed. His paintings often emerge through processes of accumulation and erasure, bringing together fragments drawn from art history, cinema, literature, personal and collective memory, and the contemporary visual field.

Images in Harel’s work rarely appear as fixed or self-contained. They arrive already carrying other images within them—echoes, quotations, residues and associations that may remain partially concealed beneath the surface. Through this layering, the paintings produce a sense of temporal compression, in which different histories and visual registers coexist. A painting can appear at once as an image, a memory of an image, and its aftermath.

Harel’s artistic practice has developed within a distinct cultural and material ecosystem shaped by printmaking, publishing, artist books, exhibitions and sustained relationships with other artists. He is one of the directors of Har-El Printers & Publishers in Jaffa, where, over many years, he has worked closely with artists including Hermann Nitsch, Jannis Kounellis, Günther Förg, Günther Uecker, Daniel Richter, and Erwin Wurm.

These collaborations have unfolded through the processes by which artworks are conceived, translated into material form, editioned, published, exhibited and ultimately enter the world. This proximity to the making and circulation of art is not separate from Harel’s own artistic practice, but forms part of the ground from which it has emerged. It has shaped an intimate understanding of the material life of images and of the complex structures through which artworks acquire presence, circulation, meaning and historical memory.

Moving between the intimacy of the studio and this wider field of artistic production, Harel’s work occupies a position in which painting is understood not as an isolated medium but as part of a broader ecology of images, objects, reproductions and references.

Harel has taught at Shenkar since 2009 and is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Multidisciplinary Art School and the Textile Department. He lives and works in Tel Aviv–Jaffa.

Exhibitions:

Openings, Solo Exhibition, Parterre Projects, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, 2024.
Graphic Cabinet, Group Exhibition, Gallery Har-El, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, 2024.
UN, Solo Exhibition, P8 Gallery, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, 2019.
Triumph of Sloggy, Three-person Exhibition, Balcont Gallery, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, 2019.
Mountain Energei, Group Exhibition, Gallery Har-El, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, 2018.
Rainbow(s) & Sandstorms, Group Exhibition, Sara Asperger Gallery, Berlin, 2009.
Paintings and Drawings, Group Exhibition, Sara Asperger Gallery, Berlin, 2008.

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