Four Figures Four Eggs at Woolwich Works: Inam Zimbalista’s meditation on the mundane - The Jewish Chronicle

Four Figures Four Eggs, presented as a one-day exhibition in the Coopers Foyer at Woolwich Works, presented a series of moving-image works by Israeli artist Inam Zimbalista. The exhibition brought together a group of short, cinematically styled video pieces that reflect the artist’s interest in identity, domesticity, family structures and the quiet rituals of daily life. Often elliptical in tone and spare in narrative, these works do not set out to tell linear stories. Instead, they assemble gestures, glances, routines and moments of rupture into a mood: something between documentary and fiction, intimacy and performance.

Zimbalista, born in Tel Aviv in 1999 and now based in London, graduated from the RCA’s MA in Contemporary Art Practice and has already exhibited at institutions including Tate Britain, Tate Modern, the Rubin Museum, Schechter Gallery, and Soho House. He works primarily in moving image, installation and photography, with a focus on how identity and social dynamics are negotiated through shared spaces and everyday interactions.

The works on view at Woolwich were technically refined and visually restrained. They featured characters, often family members, with a kind of quiet intensity. Long silences, repeated gestures and unspoken tensions dominate. Zimbalista is clearly more interested in suggestion than explanation, and his pacing demands a slower kind of attention.

Some pieces stand out for the clarity of their conceit. Mary & Jesus places a modern mother and child in the frame of a classical Christian motif, replacing sacred stillness with contemporary styling and the unsettled rhythm of video. The result is a piece that feels sharply present yet unmistakably in dialogue with centuries of Madonna-and-Child imagery. By holding the traditional and the modern in the same breath, Zimbalista reveals how the emotional core of the motif still resonates, even when stripped of its religious idealisation. At its core it is a representation of the bond between mother and child, styled in a contemporary vocabulary but with unmistakably strong connections to a long history of cultural reference. A 21st century Israeli Jewish response to centuries old Christian iconography.

Israeli artist Inam Zimbalista stands beside his piece 'Mary & Jesus'.[Missing Credit]

To its left, Balloon dress (Situation n.21) entered into an unlikely dialogue with this maternal icon. Created five years after Mary & Jesus, the 2023 work showed the artist himself in a similarly iconic framing against a dark, neutral background. A more personal response to ‘motherhood’, Zimbalista’s figure is headless, replaced by a wooden hanger, and the belly beneath the dress inflates and deflates in an endless loop, as a gesture of mock pregnancy. The pairing of these works added a layer of absurdity and quiet provocation to the exhibition’s tone.

Woman, man & hose plays with suburban masculinity and humour, setting its characters in a backyard scene that feels both ordinary and strangely composed, almost like a classical tableau staged against a backdrop of hanging laundry. The sheets act as scenery and as washing, giving the frame a mix of domestic calm and low-key drama. The man’s spraying hose is knowingly tongue-in-cheek – a gently comic, slightly self-aware nod to masculine display that makes the whole piece feel playful as much as curious.

While the exhibition isn’t didactic or emotive in any direct way, it does open up space for reflection on roles, relationships, and how performance creeps into the fabric of the everyday. For some viewers, the ambiguity will be part of the appeal; for others, it may feel hard to engage with. Either way, the visual language is consistent and deliberate.

There’s also a notable family legacy that gives the work an added layer of context. Zimbalista is the grandson of Ofra Zimbalista, the influential Israeli sculptor whose blue, life-size human figures remain a striking presence on buildings across Tel Aviv and other cities. Cast from real people and arranged in silent, theatrical poses, her sculptures turned public architecture into sites of suspended narrative. While Inam’s work is rooted in video and movement rather than plaster and stillness, both artists are concerned with how the human figure is positioned and seen – between anonymity and expression, public display and private emotion.

This exhibition also marked the final curatorial project at Woolwich Works by Liat Rosenthal, who previously worked at Tate Modern and is now taking up a new role at the Board of Deputies of British Jews as Director of Culture, Education and Communities. She told me she was especially keen to showcase Zimbalista’s work as her swansong for the venue, and to promote the potential for visual art displays within the space.

For viewers attuned to Zimbalista’s approach, Four Figures Four Eggs offers a distinct and coherent lens on human relationships – staged, stylised, and often ambiguous. It doesn’t attempt to explain itself, but invites quiet observation. For those interested in the more introspective edges of contemporary moving image, this is a reflective and carefully constructed exhibition.

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Art

israeli art