Between Four Walls

Ronit Baranga’s solo exhibition Between Four Walls presents four series of works woven into one unit. The installation created especially for the gallery focuses on the home environment as an uncanny space, where the fantasies, fears and imaginations are expressed in a realistic way on the gallery floor. Baranga divided the exhibition into three arenas of the home: a dining room, a bathroom, and the bedroom. Each arena is typically inhabited by women, tools, and objects that are intended for personal, intimate and private use. Each piece is made of human-sized clay and is hand-painted in a hyper-realistic manner, with which a second glance reveals additional layers of tension, horror and passion.

In the uncanny space created in the gallery, there is no eating in the dining room. There is no food with which to eat, and, meanwhile, the utensils are engaged in sexual intimacy among themselves. The women in this space are also occupied with themselves and not with those around them. Contemplative, disintegrating, spreading. In this uncanny bedroom, no one sleeps. A woman is lying on her back, her eyes are wide open and her multiple breasts are falling apart from her, moving away from her. The breasts are not normal breasts but, rather, they have mouths instead of nipples, as if they want to tell us something. In the bathroom two figures are bathing, on their bodies a large tattoo and, upon closer inspection, a sexual body part is revealed, hidden in the black spots. The sink echoes the same idea, revealing its insides, but it is empty, containing nothing.
The fourth group of works is the cubes. Creatures built by combining and disassembling game cubes. This combination created living characters, who manage relationships with each other. Even the dishes on the dining table create, in their nakedness, human beings who interact with each other. But while tools have fingers and mouths, sensory organs that make them active, toys have the organs of babies: feet, mouths and noses. Sweetly, with a hint of horror, they conduct relationships of play among themselves.
In this uncanny space, the abundance overshadows the emptiness. The abundance of dishes which lack any food. The abundance of breasts which lack milk, and the abundance of toys which lack the presence of the child. Baranga creates a figurative space on the border between life and still life, which deals with an emotional state associated with the domestic space, and expresses it in a fantastic yet dark and threatening way. Ordinary objects from everyday life are given human body parts and the result is an unexpected and surreal combination elements that embody the complexity of the female body, on all its levels, in a disturbing but attractive way.

Ronit Baranga’s work has been shown in various museums and galleries around the world in solo exhibitions including: Størpunkt Gallery, Munich (2021); Beinart Gallery, Melbourne (2020); Booth Gallery, NYC (2018); Raanana Municipal Gallery, Raanana (2007); and in many other group exhibitions: KIRK Gallery, Denmark (2021); Modern Eden Gallery, San Francisco (2020); Eretz Israel Museum, Tel-Aviv (2020); Abdül Mecid Efendi Museum, Istanbul (2019); Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa (2019); Akron Museum of Art, Akron, Ohio (2018); Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taiwan (2016), and in the Banksy’s group exhibition “Dismaland” in Weston-super-Mare, UK (2015).

Baranga’s work is part of many museum and private collections, such as the The National Museum of Slovenia, Ljubljana, the Great China Museum, Jingdezhen, the Yingge Ceramics Museum, Yingge, Taiwan, the Ömer Koç Collection, Istanbul, The Hieronymus Collection, Richard and Alita Rogers Family Foundation, USA, Ann and Ari Rosenblatt Collection, Guy Baram Collection and Galila Barzilai-Hollander Collection.

Baranga holds a B.A. in Psychology and Literature from Haifa University; she studied Art History in Tel-Aviv University, and Fine Arts in Beit Berl College (‘HaMidrasha’), Israel.