Curated by David Rosenberg Velorose Gallery London

Omer Ga’ash is an explorer; of the body, of new ways of connecting to our environment(s) and to ourselves, through the medium of photography. Doing so specifically through capturing people without clothes in natural and unnatural places. Stripped bare of geographical and social context - perhaps rendered equal – these people become figures, symbols, forms.

While his artworks may appear at first glance to concern themselves with an individual, or a group of people, they reveal themselves to be an investigation of existence in general; albeit through fleeting glances captured at a point in time – and are devoid of personal connection. These are specific people in particular places intended to speak of ‘Everyman’ or every body, everywhere. In the artist’s own words, ‘I look for new expressions of the body when it interacts with itself, with others and with its environment’; an out-of-one’s-own-body experience.

Making the Corporeal Abstract presents Ga’ash’s photographs of undressed bodies translated into pattern, applied to different materials from the norm. Via the manipulation of imagery, he generates patterns that do not exist in nature, but which allude to both the natural and the unnatural - if not the supernatural. His goal is to suspend judgment, to blur boundaries (personal, geographical), and to create connections between characters who may never have met, and may never meet, and thereby to tell a new and different story.

Through interaction with the patterns; from a distance and then up close and somewhat personal –shapes become people (become shapes etc). Pattern suggests infinity, and the arbitrary cut lines in any format serve to emphasise this further still. And beyond repetition, Ga’ash uses intensity of colour to blur gender, race and age, and tothereby create uniformity and acceptability.

The combinations and permutations are endless, the pattern variations unending. Almost as diverse are the applications of these artworks, as these patterns can be printed with ease onto fabrics, papers, and other materials for use in the fashion industry, costume, interior design, architecture, packaging, performance art, and beyond.

Omer Ga’ash is available for commissions in any field.

David Rosenberg, in conversation with Omer Ga’ash