born in Israel, 1959
lives and works in Tel Aviv

Since the 1980s, Ido Barel has worked with and on used bedding, which he collects from the streets of the city. The aesthetics he developed reflects the dialectic between readymade and creative work, and between an inward-looking artistic focus and the culturaleconomic- political baggage packed into everyday objects. The works in the exhibition were made with a minimum of intervention with objects collected in Paris, Tel Aviv and Thailand. In a global world of commodities and mass communications, the importance of the ethnic origin of the objects is blurred. Nonetheless, here and there, signs of material culture and nuances of local flavor emerge. Rice sacks from Thailand, Christmas packaging from Paris or election signs from Israel can be specific and general, just as a blue and white umbrella is, surprisingly, a Parisian object.

Barel's activity is distinctively acts of identification, collection, pointing and choosing. His studio looks like a warehouse of objects, which miraculously become works of art, one after another. The yellow bus stop sign, screwed into the legs of a revolving chair, seems like a local and particularly amusing paraphrase of Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel (the Parisian and the New York versions) - the center of Holon, Begin Road, the Carmelit Station.