Efrat Hakimi

"Cover"

Stone Administration Building, Entrance floor

At a time when many books are presented to the public solely in digital or audio formats, Efrat Hakimi returns to the source, to the craft of bookbinding with a “real” material: Paper. Creating and presenting book covers requires meticulous work and professionalism, elements that are inseparable from the design process and the artistic practice itself. Her work is motivated by an aspiration to grasp the fundamental essence of “being a book” — a quality inherent to all book covers, guiding her in the creation of the universal covers featured in this exhibition.

Hakimi is a multidisciplinary artist working in Israel and the USA. She holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, is a graduate with honors from Beit Berl College’s Hamidrasha Art School, and earned her master’s degree in art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

She has been awarded the Lauren and Mitchell Presser Award by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and her works have been exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Nahum Gutman Museum in Tel Aviv, and in prominent galleries across Israel and the USA.

In an article for Granta magazine, she has remarked: “I love working with paper; it’s a generous material, and I’m constantly learning from it. Through paper, I bring images to life with minimal effort in form and color. I choose subjects that find their physical expression in paper, and look for ways to make its own physical presence give meaning to the image. My favorite subjects are those that offer vibrant justification and enable me to engage playfully, capturing and expressing what I see and feel with simplicity.”