If These Are Humans series, exhibited in How Can We, with Hila Lulu Lin Farah Kufer Birim. Curated by Yael Messer at Bezalel Gallery of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. 15 May ⏤ 11 July, 2026.
The point of departure for Tomer Rosenthal’s new body of work, If These Are Humans, is the question of what it means to be human. The drawings are made through erasure of charcoal from blackened paper, an action that reveals light from within darkness, in which drawing becomes a process of discovery. The works present interactions between hybrid figures that merge human, plant, and animal, exploring the boundary between the human and the nonhuman. These figures resist stable or pure categories, unsettling the very possibility of distinguishing nature from culture, self from other.
Rosenthal explores interactions between figures belonging to different orders of being—above and below, earth and air, chthonic and etheric: that which dwells in the depths of the earth and that which hovers in the sky. In Whisper (2024), an encounter unfolds between an angel-like presence and an earthbound figure whose hand rests upon the ground. Another work, The Bird and the Archer (2024), depicts a figure from a lower order shooting an arrow at a human-bird. The work draws on Aesop’s fable about an eagle struck by an arrow, only to discover that the shaft is fletched with its own feathers. In Human-Bird, Rosenthal presents a hybrid of a man and a bird in a visual language reminiscent of cave painting, evoking an ancient longing for flight that finds an echo in the silhouettes of fighter jets.
Rosenthal’s drawings coalesce out of darkness and carry echoes of myth, symbol, and collective memory. Drawing functions as a means of investigating unconscious psychic states, a practice that opens access to a field of internal imagery. Emerging from chaos and collective anxiety, the works seek, in the artist’s words, “to find a grip through the act of drawing within a dark and dystopian reality.” Drawing becomes an act of withdrawal and containment – “a protective shell, a space in which our vulnerability may find rest.”