Paz Perlman Radio Interview

You can listen to the full Paz Perlman Radio Interview audio by clicking the link below:

Paz Perlman was born and raised in Israel and currently lives and works in New York.

She got her BA at Central St Martins, University of Arts, in London. She regularly exhibits in the US and Europe.

Her statement on her work;

Art has an authenticity when it is forged from the crucible of life’s experiences. My practice seeks to reflect this, with my childhood having been shaped by war, loss, and migration. This has created an urge, through my works, to heal the space where time and events leave their traces and scars; a fragile and unfolding process of discovery.

This exploration is expressed via bricolage, paintings, prints as well as sculptures and installations. I am attracted to discarded objects, which I often combine with more traditional materials ranging from metal and wood to textiles, paint and paper.

While the finished works can appear diverse, they are linked through cultural and personal references drawn from life, history, and a chance methodology. The foundation of them all is a yearning to convey the inexpressible.

I am like a scavenger, picking up ideas, materials and objects wherever I am in the world, then penetrating, unravelling and breaking them down to free them from the stranglehold of their conventional meaning. 

By transcending familiar elements from our everyday lives and creating challenging juxtapositions between them, their useful significance disappears, and a new thought is created.

This often results in works that are not necessarily beautiful in a traditional sense, but seek to convey vulnerability and the melancholic transient beauty of the fragility and non-solidity of our existence. This suggests a continuous process of decay and rebirth.

My fascination with impermanence comes from my 26-year study and practice of Zen Buddhism and Taoist philosophy, which relate to time as a cycle of transformation.

I am particularly interested in the concept of the void, not just as a metaphoric black hole of the unknown, but as a space of infinite potential. I often express this via the minimalistic gesture of ruin-like grid structures, which also highlight imperfection and the collapse of linear time.

By putting an emphasis on the process rather than the end result, these works are more of a question mark than a statement and allow the viewer to be part of my questing.