PASSION FOR FASHION

Artist: Ylona Aron | Curator: Irit Levin

SOLO SHOW ZAZ10TS GALLERY
June 5 - August 29, 2025
10 TIMES SQUARE | 1441 Broadway, New York, NY 10018

Ylona Aron's collagist practice is deeply rooted in the late 20th-century European photocollage tradition, corresponding with Dada and Pop Art, as well as body art and dance. Her oeuvre is marked by an ongoing exploration of form and movement—a passion sparked in her youth when she danced with the Royal Ballet of London and engaged in choreography, later acquiring profound expression within her visual work.

In her works, Aron delves into form, deconstructing and reconstructing it, to fashion dynamic compositions and enigmatic connections. She relished the ability to cut, tear, and sever, reconnecting the humorous to the lyrical, the sarcastic to the melancholic, as an imitation of life itself. "The collages echo the rhythm of a personal diary, much like the ticking of a printing press."[1]

"Ylona is a unique phenomenon in Israeli art: photography was one of her means of expression, yet always intricate; rather than mere photography, it was a construction-mask of sorts. Photography served as a building block [...] from which she would craft her pieces, and everything would come together [...]. It was no coincidence that a figure like Leo Castelli, who worked with artists practicing collage, such as Robert Rauschenberg and others, quickly identified the uniqueness of her work. He instantly recognized these qualities and offered her strong encouragement."[2]

The images featured in the works on view stem from Aron's years of research into visual culture, the history of dance, and music. In her collages, the hierarchy between center and periphery, high and low culture, and between a reproduced image and its inversion is blurred. The artist engages in a dialogue not only with the history of art, but also with street culture, gender, advertising, mass media, and more.

Aron adhered to a fixed format: a quarter sheet, a surface on which she edited and directed the work, evoking tension between empty areas on the paper and the details that populate them, and juxtaposing thin geometric strips of adhesive with fragments of photographs and magazine clippings. The acts of photography, severing, and reconnection gave rise to new weights and perspectives, oscillating between opposites.

"Without ascribing Ylona Aron to any particular tradition, one can associate her with the principle of seriality [...] and certainly underscore her affinity with the world of modern advertising, which specializes in "deconstructing" established pictorial fields to create a new order. Ylona Aron photographs and deconstructs, employing the collage technique [...]. The "realistic" reference is preserved [...] but the order, the emphases, and the ambience shift," wrote Adam Baruch. He further observed that Aron's work methods may give insight into viewing habits and visual perception as a whole.[3]

Text above by Irit Levin, curator — Excerpts from a text written for the exhibition Ylona Aron: Sharp-Eyed, 2018, Oded Shatil Liberman 8 Gallery, Tel Aviv (curator: Irit Levin).

*All artworks: Untitled, 1990–2010, Collage or Photo-Collage, 50 × 35 cm (20X14 Inches)

[1] Aron in an interview: "Life as cutting, tearing, and fragmentation," Plastic Art section, Olam HaIsha (n.d., 1993) [Hebrew].

[2] From Marc Scheps's address at a one-year memorial event in Aron's honor, Tel Aviv Artists' House, 2016 [Hebrew].

[3] Adam Baruch, "It is unclear what is happening with Ylona Aron," Media & Cultural section, Globes, 9 February 1995 [Hebrew].

Ylona Aron on ZAZ Corner’s In Between | June 5 - 29, 2025