Hadar Gad

Gad has taught painting and drawing in several places over the years, including the Meyerhoff Art Center, Tel Aviv Museum of Art. As of 2022 she is the art curator in “Hamussach”, the National Library of Israel literature and art journal. She operates as the head of the art department at the Collaborative Art Center – Givat Haviva.

Gad participated in “Afterlives”, an exhibition at the Jewish Museum, Manhattan, in 2021/2022. The show explored looted art by the Nazis during World War II, some of which that was recovered and returned to their rightful owners or museums. Gad was one of a four contemporary artists that were commissioned to address the subject. Based on archival photographs of the ruins of a Jewish assets whether of religious dwellings or objects of the minds such as books and drawings, Gad created large works that examine the relation between memory and place. She was also influenced in part by her uncle involvement in the Second Polish Republic, and depict the Great Synagogue that existed in the Free City of Danzig and was demolished in May 1939.

Gad exhibited her single show “Red” at the Rothschild Fine Art Gallery, Tel Aviv in 2017. The paintings are series of Kibbutz Ein Harod and Sha'ar Menashe mental health center. Kibbutz Ein Harod lies in the very heart of the Israeli consensus, while Sha’ar Menashe is the rejected and repressed. Gad sketches in pencil on the red oil canvases and uses a utility knife, referred to as a Japanese knife in Hebrew, to create her works, occasionally adding yellow to the red and creates an impression of internal combustion. The red symbolizes warning, signaling threat. Light being a metaphorical good, whether in religion or politics.

Gad exhibited a series of Pardes (orchard) paintings in a solo exhibition at the Rothschild Fine Art Gallery in 2012. This is the orchard rooted in her memories from childhood visits to Ein Harod. She has been painting at Ein Harod's first cemetery, located in Gidona at the foot of the Mount Gilboa, and at the cemetery of Ein Harod Meuchad. At the same time she describes landscape of the Jezreel Valley as they spread below the Kumi Hill, at whose foot lies the kibbutz.

In a 2011's solo exhibition at the Rothschild Fine Art Gallery Gad presented interior paintings focusing on the most mundane objects such as scattered underwear, a saucer with used tea bags, and a sink full of dishes. In the paintings, the objects were transformed into sites of pain and joy, personal memory, containing within themselves those experiences. In another series which deals with objects apparently trivial but symbolic, like a salt shaker paired with the words "salt of the earth," an antique silver platter with bills and coins, a milk carton and jar of honey from Pardes Hanna placed on a small map of Israel, portions of gefilte fish on porcelain plates. Irena Gordon, the curator, describe her works as both ironic and lyrical, and created a portrait of "Israeliness" through a precise and witty "I."

Starting 2007 for an eleven-year period Gad visited the Jezreel Valley cemeteries on a weekly basis and created a series of painting, notably of the cemetery of Kibbutz Ein Harod, where she was born and both her grandparents, Arieh Gad and Esther Budko, sister of artist Joseph Budko are buried. The works are generally associated with the myth of the Kibbutz, the ethos of the pioneers, and the place of graveyards, mourning and remembrance in early Israeli society. Gad's own correspondence with death and memory is joined with a pursuit for beauty and redemption. In 2009 she exhibited a collection of her works on the subject in "Block, Section, Row", a solo show at the Mishkan Museum of Art.

Hadar Gad was born in kibbutz Ein Harod Meuhad, and raised in Beersheba and kibbutz Karmia. She studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris, from 1981 to 1983, and at the Avni Institute of Art and Design, Tel Aviv, from 1983 to 1987. There she practiced printmaking technique, specializing in engraving. In the years 1984, 1985 and 1986 she received scholarships from the Israeli Ministry of Education. After graduation she worked as an assistant in The Etching Workshop Tel Aviv Artists House. In 2016 she was the recipient of The Ministry of Culture Award from the Ministry of Culture and Sport, Israel.

Hadar Gad (Hebrew: הדר גד; born 1960) is an Israeli artist.