In the studio, Meira Tadmor works within a space that is at once intimate and fictional—a space in which worlds take shape. These are not complete worlds in any narrative sense, but constellations of images, materials, and memories drawn together through the artist’s emotional world. They emerge gradually, layer upon layer, as inward environments given material form. Yet unlike artistic traditions that seek to stabilize form and establish wholeness, Tadmor’s process does not end with the act of creation. At the very moment when a world seems to be taking shape, an opposite movement begins: De-Genesis—the unravelling of a world, an inversion of the act of creation. Objects are cut apart, dismantled, broken, and at times deliberately wounded. Matter loses its stability, and the image its coherence. This is not destruction for its own sake, but a process of inquiry: a penetration into what has already been made, its unravelling and reopening to unforeseen possibilities.

At the heart of this process lies Tadmor’s approach to collecting materials. She gathers found objects, papers, magazines, photographs, fragments, and remnants, as well as raw materials that might otherwise appear devoid of value. The studio thus becomes a space of absorption, sorting, and accumulation, in which reality is already broken down into units available for transformation. Out of this dual process of construction and unravelling, gathering and assembly, emerge hybrid sculptures and objects that carry
within them both the memory of their making and the traces of their subsequent disassembly.

Tadmor’s sculptures have affinities with the Dada and Surrealist traditions of the early twentieth century. In the work of Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann, Meret Oppenheim, and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, disparate objects were brought together in unexpected configurations, while the everyday object was removed from its functional context and transformed into an artwork that could be ironic, critical, and at times unsettling. In Tadmor’s work, too, the boundaries between utility, body, and imagination become unstable, yet the found object is absorbed into a quieter, more painstaking process of handwork. She brings together organic materials, industrial objects, items collected from the street, and studio-made elements, painting, cutting, and reworking them until they lose their original identities.

In this sense, her works also carry a distant echo of the world of Hieronymus Bosch, in which everyday objects, body parts, animals, and instruments coalesce into configurations of hybridization and transformation. Yet unlike Bosch’s moral allegories, Tadmor’s objects do not preach. They accumulate layers of time, use, and wear until they become something like small memorials to vanished worlds of craft, memory, and objects.

The human body, too, is present, though indirectly. Holes, curves, cavities, and contours preserve the memory of a hand, an eye, or a human action. In this respect, the works also recall Giacometti, in whose work the body is reduced to a fragile sign; in Tadmor’s, it disperses into the very configuration of objects.

The collages operate according to the same principle. Layers of printed paper are built up one upon another, then cut into, pared away, and exposed. Collage thus becomes a kind of archaeology of the image: a process in which the surface itself is unravelled and opened up, allowing new images and structures to emerge from the fracture. Ultimately, the De-Genesis is a cyclical process of construction, unravelling, and reassembly—a world that never arrives at a final form.


* The title is taken from an album by Vaadat Charigim (2013). The full essay, together with a conversation with the artist, appears in the artist’s book accompanying the exhibition.