Cactus Collective is a group of artists who have self-published artists' books. We have come together to support each other in promotion and marketing. We launched our collective at the London Art Book Fair 2019 in Whitechapel Art Gallery, and plan to participate in various fairs around the globe. In addition to the books we offer limited editions, original watercolours and other collectable merchandise.
Meeting Place
Meeting Place is a physical emblem of art and literature. Anat approached five female writers and five male writers whose writing was close to her heart and invited them to her studio in Tel Aviv to pick one of her artworks, from which they embarked to their own literary journey- producing ten new stories and poems.
Anat Propper Goldenberg is a multidisciplinary artist, eco-art pioneer and an activist.
Anat has shown few large-scale solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group exhibitions.
Painting Machine
Painting Machine: Guy Shoham is and artist’s book designed by acclaimed London studio A Practice for Everyday Life. Its unique design and structure reflect aspects of his practice.
There is a cyclical element to Shoham’s work – often one series evolves into and overlaps with another – and it plays with such tropes as real vs illusory, high culture vs low and tromple l'oeil. In response, Painting Machine is made in two sections, playing on the idea of beginning and end: one containing artworks, the other texts. The two sections are bound onto a cloth hardback cover, with the sections sitting on opposite sides of the inside cover. Artworks appear on contrasting backgrounds of different types, from street photos to veneer samples and digitally manipulated watercolours made especially for the book, all of which encourage the questioning of what constitutes the work. While pages are unnumbered and works are seemingly organised arbitrarily, the background groupings hint both at the paintings' chronology and inspiration.
Shoham’s is a personal quest, one which examines the craft of painting and the medium’s place in the world of art. His work raises questions about the perceived dichotomies between beauty and temptation, high and low art, abstraction and realism, kitsch and modernism – and seeks to blur these boundaries.
The artist's grandfather founded the family timber yard in the 1930s in Tel-Aviv. It was an exciting place in which to hide and play, and Shoham’s childhood memories are scattered with sawdust and towering stacks of plywood sheets. Shortly after the patriarch’s death in 2003, a fire destroyed the business along with souvenirs and documents from the past 70 years. These remembrances and events are manifest in Shoham's work in ways formal and metaphoric.
