Last Skin
A solo exhibition by Ronen Raz
Curator: Ori Drumer
11.9.2025 - 11.10.2025
Photos: Dadi Elias
In his solo exhibition “The Last Skin,” Ronen Raz presents leather sculptures and new drawings based on the landscapes of his childhood in northern Tel Aviv during the 1970s—at the fringes between city and nature, a seam where dereliction and urbanity meet.
The objects in the exhibition are crafted from the artist’s collection of leather scraps, sourced from used clothing and footwear. The works convey a presence that is dark, or even sinister, of edges and boundaries—material, geographic, corporeal, and emotional. A closer look reveals concealed layers beneath the immediately visible: wood fragments, charcoal, plants, and soil samples are revealed to be leather fabrications, constructions created from tightly bound layers.
Raz’s body of work also includes vintage porcelain animal figurines wrapped in leather—delicate decorative objects that act as “aesthetic traps,” suggesting an alternative to everyday life. The accumulation of items in the exhibition constructs itself as “nature.” The artist employs camouflage and then exposes it, thus creating a space that suggests alternative perceptions of identity. The display in the gallery space is a balance between archival presentation and a domestic atmosphere. “The Last Skin” blends the contemporary spirit of these days in Israel with marginal habitats, vanishing nature, and human yearning.
The annual exhibition theme, “How to get through it?,” is interpreted in this show as an imagined habitat, as modes of survival, emergency, escape plans, and disenchantment.
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.