Yuri Katz (b. 1974, Kiev, Ukraine; immigrated to Israel in 1990; lives and works in KibbutzHanita) begins his explanation about the series Leg-Split with a joke: "It is said aboutimmigrants from Russia that if one of them gets off the plane without a musical instrumentcase, it means that he plays the piano," he laughs. "It represents the fact that anyone whocomes from Russia carries some kind of baggage. I don't perceive myself as a technicalartist, but this quality is embedded in me, somewhere, too. Like many artists, I also havea constant fear or attempt to confront the technical things I have learned. If you are anartist who seeks nothing else, then okay, you paint what you learned. But if you insist ondiscovering new things, on breaching boundaries, on regarding this whole thing as anadventure, then you find yourself constantly fighting what you learned: that this is how itis done, that this is the right way."
Katz studied art in high school and at a preparatory school for design in Kiev. Afterimmigrating to Israel, he completed a BFA and an MFA at the University of Haifa. "Anyonewho studied at an academy in Russia will find it harder to open up to something else," hesays. "I never painted with realistic precision, but my paintings have always conducted adialogue with reality and its forms. There has always been a figure in the middle of the page,there were a floor and a ceiling and a chair. I felt like a pianist who plays a masterpiece, andcan put himself into it, even though everything is given in advance. There is reality, and Ihave operated within its rules—I did not add a third hand, because people have two hands,because these are the rules. Within these rules you can search, which I did, in small steps,when I turned in the direction of grotesque and exaggeration. […] The penchant for thegrotesque is intended to enhance the expressions, gestures, and postures. But in the presentworks, it is taken to the extreme. All things deviate from their boundaries, and this is perhapsthe very beginning of the current change."
This change, Katz discloses, is an initial shift in a slightly different direction, which isreflected in his recent series: "In these works I no longer accept the frame, the envelopeof either the body or reality. In the new works, currently numbering about 25, which I amstill fine tuning, there is a thin line which is never entirely clear. It is no longer a chair ora table. I'm trying to deconstruct the body, not to be committed. All the planes, all the volume, everything associated with reality—I try to set all of these free and let other thingshappen. I don't restrain myself. If a stain suddenly forms, I embrace it. [...] I deconstructthe body into a pile of organs. I delivered it from the need to be one logical system. At thesame time, however, the body is still constantly present in the new works. The presence ofthe figure, and the communication it summons with another, the viewer for that matter—this is something that has always characterized my works. Somehow, I cannot release apainting that does not contain a human figure. Every touch of the canvas ultimately beginsand ends with a figure."
"I am a sufferer," says Katz. "I really specialize in it. With all the sorrow involved, I can dragsomething until it leaves me short of breath. It has reached a point where I could no longermake these canvases with the figure in the middle, whose whole drama lies in the movementor in the elbow or in the dab representing the eye. I would sit facing the canvas and find nointerest in doing it anymore. Perhaps COVID-19 has also created some window of time andleisure; suddenly I can be at home and that's okay; you are no longer the one stuck at homepainting; what you do is acceptable and common. I am in such a period that every day I haveanother revelation, like a person who suddenly discovers multiplication and realizes that heno longer needs to add the same number repeatedly…"
