The short film Studio Visit with Moran Kliger is available to watch at the top of the page.
Moran Kliger, a renowned artist, dives into the complex interplay of human civilization and our untamed, primal origins through her striking and intricate drawings. Kliger’s creatures, human-animal hybrids, seem at ease in the wild, their eyes challenging our understanding of existence itself. Through her labor-intensive, detailed drawings, Kliger opens a portal to a universe that feels both primeval and post-apocalyptic.
In her Primates series (2015-2017), Kliger utilizes a range of techniques to craft life-size drawings that blur the boundaries between human and ape. These mysterious hybrids inhabit a world that’s peculiar yet familiar, their expressions and postures mirroring our own. Such relatability triggers a sense of familiarity and empathy, even as the creature’s origins and thoughts are left to the viewer’s interpretation. Echoing Freud’s concept of “The Uncanny,” Kliger’s primates unsettle us, presenting the strange within the known and touching upon the very essence of our being.
Kliger’s solo exhibition at Basis Gallery in 2018, Seven Primates, expanded upon this exploration of our primal roots. The exhibition showcased large-scale pencil sketches of primates housed within enclosures resembling zoo cages or museum displays. These creations, at once chaotic and awe-inspiring, challenged our perceptions of identity and hierarchy. Strikingly, Kliger stripped these primates of their natural surroundings, positioning them instead within contexts reminiscent of Old and New Testament scenes. This provocative juxtaposition called for a reevaluation of our cultural and social orders, shifting focus from the spiritual to the secular, from the cultured to the savage.
Kliger’s body of work encompasses emotive, narrative drawings that sprawl over extensive workspaces. Created through painstaking, sometimes regimented labor, her pieces – despite their graphic, seemingly neutral appearance – harbor deep emotional resonance. Often, her drawings exceed traditional constraints and evolve into spatial installations. Kliger grapples with the dichotomy within the human psyche – the battle between the civilized and the untamed – and through the incorporation of motifs from raw nature and fantastical elements, she navigates the intricate relationships between these opposing facets of humanity.
The featured video Studio Visit with Moran Kliger is part of the web series Yotsrim by Shachaf Dekel. Yotsrim includes five seasons and 73 episodes. The series won the Best Documentary award at the NYC Web Fest in 2019.
