Irit Hemmo

Irit Hemmo, born 1961, is a Tel Aviv based artist and Senior Lecturer in the Fine Arts Department at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem. Hemmo’s work varies between different mediums and techniques. In the past four years she has worked on an ongoing project - a body of paintings made with dust. For this project, she built a room where she creates dust storms via manipulated vacuum cleaners, resulting in layers of dust (and time) upon carefully placed stencils. In her latest solo show, Hemmo exhibited the dust-room as an automated, time based installation, as well as a projected video. Upon the room's floor, Hemmo created scale sized monuments and objects, which resembled the modern city's architecture. The manipulated vacuum cleaners created dust storms periodically, covering and revealing throughout the show, as the dust piled up over the floor's landscape to create an illusion of a catastrophe, a post-apocalyptic environment where once there was life. Irit has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the globe including: The Istanbul Biennale; New York; London; Munich; Koln; Hamburg; Vienna; Valencia; Basel, among many other venues. Her works are part of the collections of both Israel Museum, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Museum of Art, as well as various institutional and private collections.