Ronit Baranga

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With their probing tongues and wandering fingers, Ronit Baranga’s sculptures are immediately recognisable for their mischievous, playful quality. By giving human features to everyday objects she gives them an identity beyond their original intention and transforms them into characters who create their own amusing narratives. More recently, she has extended her practice to include a variety of other strange figurative works.

Implicit in Baranga’s work is an age-old question of art vs craft or in this case, art vs ceramics. She says when she first started her ceramic studies that she was conscious of not fitting neatly into either context, ‘neither here nor there’. From this discomfort, she began her series of surreal tea set crockery, where utilitarian objects designated for specific purposes, such as plates, cups and milk jugs, were transformed by way of fingers and mouths into active agents who had choice over their own identity. Thus ‘craft’ became ‘art’, ‘still’ became ‘alive’, ‘passive’ became ‘active’, and each of these objects could ‘decide whether to use itself, whether to allow me to use it, or whether to run away’.

This act of personification extends to other objects in Baranga’s visual vocabulary. In her Tea Party installations, she also features a range of cupcakes, sponge cakes and pies, with mouths, some open with bared teeth and exploring tongues, some closed but poised to open at any moment. Again a tension is set up between subject and object. As viewers, we are enticed and tantalised by the sweets and desserts on offer, and compelled to partake in these objects, and yet our desires are also thwarted by the sense of danger present; we feel obliged to keep some distance, almost as if a mouth might bite us before we bite the dessert, or verbally refuse our approach.

With the subject matter of food, hands and mouths, there is a distinct sensuality and tactility about Baranga’s work. Although we cannot touch the sculptures ourselves, the objects freely touch and interact with each other. Baranga says, ‘the whipped cream cakes are hedonistic and sensual symbolising abundance. The dishes’ fingers are pushed into the desserts, into the whipped cream’. In making her work she asked herself, ‘If a milk jug pinches a kettle, how does its flesh feel like? How can I convey this feeling?’ The sensation and feeling is then something that we, as viewers, experience vicariously through these objects. Baranga’s use of sensual organs such as fingers and mouths also extend to other artworks, where she has covered a gallery wall with hundreds of palms and in another instance multiple mouths. Again the distinction between ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’ is disrupted and the artwork is feeling and responding to itself and its environment. Appropriately, Baranga has described the mouth as metaphorical ‘border between the inner body and the external environment surrounding it’.

Baranga’s work is also characterised by a sense of movement and dynamism. As well as the scampering fingers in her Tea Party works, which create a sense of aliveness, there is a sense of unpredictability as stacked plates form teetering towers and threaten to tip over. In another work a collection of hands are bound together with one continuous thread, and yet although they are restricted in movement, there is a tenuousness involved; at any moment one of the hands could let go and the whole structure could collapse. Similarly, her human figures, whether babies or children or women, are also portrayed mid-action, with the audience unable to predict what may happen next. Whatever stillness they may have as objects of art, Baranga ensures that they are very much alive in terms of intention and possibility.

Describing herself as having an ‘irresistible urge to create’, Baranga begins all of her work with just an image in her mind’s eye, without preliminary sketches or drawings, and then allows the plasticity of the clay to create itself. She then works with models to improve the proportions. She describes the relationship between herself and her medium as being very important and something that she has evolved over the last 15 years. As her work contains so many different elements and objects, she creates these separately and then connects all the pieces together later into a single sculpture. Several series are worked on simultaneously and she always has works in progress. After slow drying her works for several weeks or months, they are fired in a ceramic kiln and then painted and glazed.

Born in 1973, Baranga has a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Literature from the University of Haifa in Israel. She also studied Art History at University of Tel Aviv and Fine Arts at Beit Berl College (‘HaMidrasha’) in Israel. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is part of many museum and private collections. Most notably, she participated in the Triennale Design Museum in Milan in 2012 and Banksy’s Dismaland in 2015. Baranga was awarded Israeli Ministry of Culture Award in 2016.

Photo of Ronit Baranga preparing work for All Things Sweet and Painful

Ronit Baranga is represented by Beinart Gallery. She has had two solo exhibitions at Beinart Gallery, Tea Party in 2018 and All Things Sweet and Painful in 2020 and has a third solo exhibition scheduled for 2023.

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