Last Skin
A solo exhibition by Ronen Raz
Curator: Ori Drumer
11.9.2025 - 11.10.2025
Photos: Daniel Hanoch
Ronen Raz presents a body of work comprising a series of objects shaped from recycled and processed leather, alongside graphite and charcoal drawings, watercolor paintings, and sculptures of animals, pieces of charcoal, stones, clumps of earth, soil samplings, rock fragments, gravel and construction debris, a plant, and a burnt tree stump — all crafted from leather. Upon closer observation and scrutiny, it becomes evident that these objects are in fact all leather fabrications. Displayed alongside them are a terrarium, an abandoned insect habitat, jars containing miniscule plant cuttings, and a naturalistic model of a preserved insect from the stick insect family, on a branch in a typical camouflage pose, mounted on a veneer-covered base.
This is the Last Skin – an array of representations of survival; remnants, exuviae, traces, memory -fragments enveloped in different ways: leather-envelopes; visual representations – objects that themselves serve as visual envelopes; a visual envelope for dreams, fantasies, imaginings, and more.
Raz was born and raised in ‘Shikun L’ in northern Tel Aviv during the 1970s — a transitional area located at the city’s edge, where nature and urbanity merged. Over the years, the city expanded and took over the untended terrain that gradually disappeared, leaving behind only an imagined space from which emerged new objects whose origins lie in the marginal fringes: material, geographic, corporeal, and emotional.
Exhibition space
The gallery space functions as a potential environment, akin to a container or habitat — housing the output of a laboratory of experimentation and research, the artist’s studio; incubators for memories, imaginations, impressions, cast-offs, and proposals for future life — all presented through varying applications of leather.
Leather works
The objects in the exhibition are derived from the artist’s collection of used leather clothing and footwear, as well as discarded damaged stock. The leather, stripped from the garments, undergoes various chemical processes — soaking, thinning, and softening — aimed at recycling and reprocessing the material. The leather carries a generational history through its transformation into clothing and footwear objects via industrial procedures. Raz manually recycles and reworks the leather until it is ready to be raw material for his creations — actions that preserve the memory of leatherworking, a practice long forgotten and erased by industrialization and mechanization.
A deeper look at the leather works reveals additional layers: tightly bound, reinforced, or leather-clad structures. At first glance, the viewer sees a simple, everyday object; wonders about its similarities and differences, lingering in the ambiguity of its origins. With prolonged observation, intimate details and subtleties emerge, and as the leather origin is revealed, the effect is one of alienation — even repulsion. Raz explains: “I process the leather so that it becomes difficult to distinguish between the original and the imitation (the copy); so that the copy becomes more faithful to the original.”
Other objects include fine vintage porcelain figurines of animals from Eastern Europe, delicate decorative items—likely relics from distant living rooms—which the artist coats in recycled leather, transforming their form. The process of coating and reshaping carries a subtle memory of the original, lively shapes, yet they become, in fact, something new, born from the use of the leather envelope.
Drawings and paintings
The drawings and paintings in the exhibition are the result of a prolonged process of observation and of delicate, precise rendering of imagined yet realistic landscapes—the fringes between urbanity and nature, desolate areas, urban seams, and at times, distant buildings. What emerges seems an attempt to reconstruct an incomplete and partially imagined memory. Alongside these landscapes and spaces, Ronen paints ‘furscapes’ in watercolor; flayedplain fur that, in turn, is transfigured into fantastical and unsettling imagined landscapes.
Abandoned terrarium
An insect habitat, on top of which sit jars, each containing tiny plant cuttings. At the bottom of the habitat are leaves and insect eggs from the Phasmatodea order once raised in the terrarium. Another object is a naturalistic model, featuring a preserved specimen (female) in a camouflage posture, integrated with a plant on a veneer-coated base. The construction of the terrarium and the natural model evoke an entomological lab, still trying to preserve something of the vanishing natural world. The only objects here that are alive and truly natural are the cuttings—tiny plants, segments of mature plants that have been cut and separated from another in order to grow new roots independently, allowing them to reproduce.
Closing Remarks
Skin is a tissue that covers the entire body—a liminal space between exterior and interior, between the animalistic and the cultural. The most intimate marks and traumas are inscribed on the skin. At the same time, animal skin or hide is an industrial material subject to the laws of fashion and economics.
Raz’s use of skin evokes a covering that envelops the skeleton, flesh, and muscles. These skins are visual shells, and simultaneously containers of senses, dreams, and imaginations. Raz transforms the processed leather into a dreamscape, alters its form, and creates something entirely new. In his works, leather may serve as a casing for porcelain sculptures, as a standalone object, or as a replica so faithful to the original that the viewer’s eye mistakes it for the real skin (a visual illusion or a predatory trap with perturbing qualities). In these works, the distinction between skin and the object itself is obliterated, somewhat like an insect’s camouflage technique. The skin becomes a shell for an empty space, a remnant of sorts. This is a total erasure of distinction—leaving the skin as a husk containing emptiness and embodying death; whereas the covering of an entity in skin preserves the distinction and embodies life.
The Last Skin is a manifestation of compressed pain—pain that grows a skin, like a protective shell that enables life and shields it. Yet shedding a skin and baring the naked body also exposes it to death. These are cycles of life, loss, processing, and death. The traditions and historical practices of leather processing and recycling are inherent in the works as a memory of the future; alongside processes of change and metamorphosis, covering and stripping, coating and imitation, protection and entrapment, enveloping and vanishing. The final skin,having undergone these transformations, materializes in its new form as a work of art, manifesting its metamorphoses between life and death, between first skin and final skin.
Ori Drumer, Art Curator and Cultural Researcher
About the artist and the curator:
Ronen Raz is an artist who creates in sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. His sculptures are made from repurposed leather, bringing the organic closer to the inorganic and generating encounters between biological tissues and inanimate objects. Raz has held two solo exhibitions, including “Silver Farm” at the Zimak Gallery in Tel Aviv, and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in galleries and museums both in Israel and abroad. Among the venues are Maya Gallery in Tel Aviv, Barbur Gallery in Jerusalem, Haifa Museum of Art, Fresh Paint Art Fair, Blue Star Contemporary in the USA, and the Sculpture Triennale in Poznań, Poland. His works can be found in collections in Israel and internationally, and have received several awards and commendations.
Ori Drumer – curator, art and culture researcher, artist, musician, and trained psychotherapist. He is an interdisciplinary fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Active in the music scene since 1984 and founder of the “Dorlux Sedlux” band. Active as an artist since 1992, and from 1996 as a curator and art researcher. In recent years, he has curated a variety of exhibitions, including at the Herzliya Museum and the Tel Aviv Museum. He has authored several research books on alternative Israeli art that accompanied the exhibitions he curated, and has published numerous articles in journals and catalogs over the years.
Exhibition Opening
Photos: Dadi Elias