The Israel Makov Award

This moment’s planet

The Israel Makov Most Promising Artist Award 2025

Curator: Raz Shapira

At the core of Shlomit Gopher’s work lies perception. Her works are relative to her own being and preserve it: her proportions, the way her eyes perceive color and divide the environment. Nothing is objective; everything is relational.

Gopher was awarded the Makov Prize for a Promising Artist for the body of work she presented at the Freshpaint Art Fair Greenhouse in 2025. Her works, which at first glance appeared cheerful and naive, colorful and formalistic, revealed deeper layers upon a more prolonged observation – dialogues between stains, shapes, and surfaces, forming a rich tapestry of movement, rhythm, and expression. The vivid colors captivate both eye and heart, uncovering something primal and essential about existence.

Seventy percent of the human body is water, and so is the body of Shlomit Gopher’s work.

This series was created using a unique technique researched and implemented by Gopher, involving paper fibers she processes herself from banana fibers through a cycle of grinding, soaking, dyeing, positioning, compressing, and drying. In her small studio in the southern part of the city, vessels of various sizes are filled with wet, colorful mixtures, and on the tables – luminous, seductive surfaces of color within patterns converge and separate, mapping perception.

Gopher lays the wet mixtures side by side, creating motifs and a dialogue between line, form, and color; through the drying process and the application of heavy pressure, she squeezes, dehydrates, and preserves the image.

Unlike the presentation that won her the Promising Artist award, the human body is absent from the works in the current exhibition. It has been replaced by primordial elements – sun, water, earth, sky. Yet perspective remains present, running like a common thread through the different series. This is not a commanding or patronizing gaze, positioned at a high vantage point and looking down upon the landscape. Gopher’s works challenge the Romantic perception of space – the insignificance of man against the forces of nature and the world. The viewer does not stand opposite the work; the viewer is within it.

Inside the halls, inside the landscapes, inside the environment. The spiritual encounter between earth and sky, between human and space, is given a bold, radiant, and “trippy” expression. Gopher’s choice of color and line conveys the ecstatic thrill generated at the moment of connection between presence and place.

What happens when there are no partitions, and everything touches everything.