Sighted Unseen – February 2026

Featured artists: Tali Ben Bassat, Yehoshua (Shuki) Borkowski, Eshchar Hanoch Klingerbeil, Moshe Kupferman, Orly Sever, Yonatan Tzofi

On a flight to Houston, Texas, sitting in the aisle seat, I close my eyes. In my mind’s eye I envision the moment I enter the Rothko Chapel – an octagonal structure designed by Philip Johnson as a nondenominational house of prayer (1971). Site-specific oil paintings are mounted on the walls, the last works painted by Mark Rothko (1964-1969); natural light filters from above, and mats for prayer, meditation, and contemplation are scattered below. About five years separate the architectural act from the artistic act, after which Neil Armstrong’s call from the moon was heard in Houston: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed” (1969). Between the silence of the distant celestial body and the chapel across the ocean, the exhibition sets out to follow suit, operating as a mechanism of pausing, as a space that allows those who enter it to slow down, breathe deeply, and look straight ahead.

The artworks in the exhibition function as arenas of active silence – painting installations composed as a syntactic sentence or a musical score, drawn from an artist’s body of work alongside pieces from other periods or cycles. The space is traversed by a sculptural video installation that traces the same melody in three dimensions. Each work carries subtle gestures to line and material, inviting a deep focus as if it were itself an act of breathing. The exhibition as a whole is also an arena – a space that offers the possibility of calibrating a state of gazing and surrendering to the act of mark-making or drawing, to the colors, textures, and the elusiveness of the image.

“Sighted Unseen ”indicates something that happens covertly, in secret, far from sight. The play on words in the exhibition title alludes to the physical act of seeing, which begins with the recognition of color, line, shape, and movement, and yet still holds something that remains hidden. The exhibition seems to share an intimate secret with its viewers within a Kupfermanian context, offering a new, site- and time-specific reading of his works, which usually remain untitled – as “pockets of silence where we can root and grow” (Mark Rothko, lecture at Yale, 1969)

Irit Carmon Popper, Curator