In the group show Mindscape: Patterns of Identity at L’Space, people, animals, and places shift and juxtapose, coming together like pieces of a map—one that charts the shared inner terrain of memory, trauma, and identity. Curated by Noa Rabinovich Lalo and Carolina Werebe, with L’Space founder Lily Almog, the show, as Almog puts it, draws on “a shared Israeli heritage and a deep connection to the contemporary art scene in Israel, a country with a rich cultural history and traditions amidst ongoing uncertainty.” And it’s that sense of uncertainty that pulls everything together—voids and absences linger in the air. Even when the work seems rooted in specific places, the setting remains layered and elusive, offering more questions than answers. This is evident in Netta Lieber Sheffer’s sweeping charcoal drawing installation of Sigmund Freud’s Vienna clinic, where he lived and worked for 47 years before fleeing the Nazis in 1938.
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This was the birthplace of psychoanalysis, crammed with books, ethnographic artifacts, and art—a whole world of ideas and civilizations condensed into one room. Lieber Sheffer’s work freezes it in time, leaving it abandoned and lost.
With delicate, exacting lines, she traced the clinic into a replica that feels both solid and ghostly, a perfect reconstruction and a shadow of what it once was. The act of rebuilding is full of yearning but also futile—the façade, made of an erasable, ash-like substance, reminds us how fragile what we hold onto can be and how easily the familiar slips away.
This haunting absence is most poetically captured in the image of a wide staircase, its ornate wrought iron railing, leading to a tall window framed by secession-style patterned bars. The window lets the light in but reveals nothing beyond, amplifying the sense of loss and longing. It’s as if Freud’s ghost is ascending those steps, heading toward a future that stays just out of reach—unseen, unknowable.
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Ido Michaeli also references an iconic place. In his project Central Park Carpets, Michaeli blends the geometric layout of Central Park with Persian rug patterns, creating a striking bridge between cultural heritage and modern urban life. Central Park is more than a park—it’s a symbol of the West, now embedded in the centuries-old tradition of Eastern carpets, which are hand-woven in Afghanistan, forcing us to see both in a new light.
Michaeli’s project traces a line from Mesopotamia, where the first gardens emerged, to today’s urban parks. Those early gardens inspired carpets that brought nature indoors, a tradition that still endures in Persian rugs filled with garden imagery. Michaeli isn’t just merging histories—he’s finding common ground where it seems like none exists. By weaving East and West, past and present, into one image, Central Park Carpets offers a vision of coexistence in a tragically divided world.
Moran Kliger’s large-scale pencil and ink-on-paper drawings bring us face-to-face with creatures caught between man and ape. They inhabit vast white or black voids, refusing to sit comfortably in any category. They’re something out of a myth—or maybe a dream. Their faces and gestures are heartbreakingly human—expressive, thoughtful, even tender—while their physicality leans animalistic, so close to us yet so distant. These figures seem to exist somewhere between the ancient and the futuristic, nowhere and everywhere, the human and beyond human, loaded with meaning but resisting explanation. They demand you think harder about what they are—and maybe what we are, too. This leaves us unsettled, suspended in the tension of recognizing ourselves in something other.
Kliger doesn’t offer answers. Instead, the drawings raise questions—difficult ones—about what it means to be human and just how thin the boundary is between us and everything we think we’ve left behind. Monumental and unframed, these drawings are mounted directly on the walls, evoking iconic biblical scenes traditionally painted on church walls or heavy wood panels, but here rendered in pencil on loose fragile paper—further challenging our expectations.
Although, unlike the other three artists in this show, Maya Perry paints with oil on canvas, her paint flows across the surface in thin washes punctuated by strong lines. Like Kliger, Perry’s paintings depict animals and humans; however, hers conjure dark fairytales with an intimate, self-portrait-like quality. Perry’s animals carry symbolic weight and are open to opposing interpretations—a wolf can be seen as threatening or protective, a butterfly as vulnerable or resilient. The yellowish washes suggest the light of early dawn, the moment before waking up from a long nightmare into a new day.
Mindscape pulls us inward, asking us to navigate the messy layers of memory, trauma, and identity. What makes the show resonate is how it ties the personal to the cultural, the private to the historical—reminding us that these connections are both deeply specific and universal. For these Israeli artists, their shared heritage and its complexities shape the works, yet the questions they ask—about loss, longing, and selfhood—speak to all of us. And then there’s the act of drawing: direct and human. It documents, maps, and bridges the internal and external. In Mindscape, drawing becomes the connective tissue—binding the artists to their roots while reminding us of the deeper humanity that transcends any single identity.
All photos courtesy of L’Space Gallery
Mindscape: Patterns of Identity at L’space through January 25th, 2025,
Netta Lieber Sheffer | Moran Kliger | Ido Michaeli | Maya Perry
Curated by Noa Rabinovich Lalo and Carolina Werebe, and Lily Almog