Alona Harpaz

With her iconic palette, Alona mixes and juxtaposes pure colors in a profuse and unrestricted way, filling her works with vibrant gestures of sensuality and strength.

 In her work, as the critic Elke Buhr points out, there is a mixture of politics and beauty. In one of her self-portraits, "Frequency Watchers", she paints herself on a motorbike alluding to the Riot Grrrl, and of course, to the band Bikini Kill, who mixed punk, feminism and pink lipstick in an unusual way. According to the artist: "perfectly beautiful paintings can be terrible". Colors exist in their own right, as abstract points, organic forms or scribbles without a particular purpose; they also point to things we recognize. The combination of politics and beauty in her work is, in a way, a reflection of her family: her father was born on a Kibbutz and her Romanian mother was a ballet dancer. As Richard Prince wrote in ArtReview magazine, her "painting... is a mixture of Matisse with Sigmar Polke and punk. Maybe even with Kippenberger..."