Acerca de

Hadar Kleiman addresses the aesthetics of opulent consumerism and new-age culture through a combination of materials such as resin, terrazzo, ceramics, formica, borax crystals, wood, and found objects. Her sculptures and immersive installations combine textures and colors that tend to be seductive, lucrative, shiny, and eye-catching, like the objects glimpsed in a shopping mall window.

She questions the absurdity of luxury and pseudo-spirituality in a whimsical way, critiquing humanity’s insatiable need for consumption, production, and the colonization of nature. By recontextualizing commonplace symbols in a gallery setting, her work questions the essence of an object and its iconography, investigating the gap between symbolic registers and the true meaning of the thing itself, the signifier and the signified.

Through various mediums and materials, Kleiman creates diorama-like installations and sculptures. Her work explores the tropes and symbols of emoji culture, New Age-ism, and Las Vegas casino aesthetics, blending  these symbols to create allegorical fantasy worlds.

In terrazzo and plastic laminate works, she reproduces an almost industrial veneer, despite being handmade. The idea is to detach the hand-crafted labor from the work, as if the objects were manufactured or made on an assembly line. These works blur the lines between art and design, commercial and one-of-a-kind, the singularity of an art piece versus the superabundance of consumer culture. The process references traditional artisanship and archival crafts such as Roman mosaics and medieval tapestries, which have transitioned into commercial and industrialized formations, such as public space flooring and wall coverings.

Kleiman was born in Jerusalem and lives and works in NY. She received her BFA from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem in 2013 and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2015. She has participated in various shows and art fairs including UNTITLED San Francisco, stArtup fair, and Spring/Break NY. Her work has been featured in Momus, KQED, and Dissolve Magazine.