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About Artist:
Itzchak Tarkay was born in 1935 in Subotica on the Yugoslav Hungarian border. When he was only nine years old, the Nazis sent Tarkay to Mathausen concentration camp. After the war, he returned home and developed an interest in art. While still at school in Subotica, he won a prize for excellence in painting. In 1949 he and his family immigrated to Israel and were sent to a transit camp for new arrivals at Beer Ya'akov. Their next two years were spent in a Kibbutz. In 1951, Tarkay received a scholarship to the Bezalel Art Academy in Jerusalem, where he studied for a year before having to leave due to difficult financial circumstances at home. In order to continue his scholarship, he was allowed to study under the artist Schwartzman until his mobilization to the Israeli army. After returning to the familiar environment of Tel Aviv, Tarkay enrolled in the Avni Institute of Art, which he graduated in 1956. His teachers there were Mokady, Janko, Schtreichman and Sematsky. Tarkay has since exhibited extensively both in Israel and abroad, and his works can be found in many public and private collections. For fifteen years, the Israeli artist Tarkay has been entertaining, charming, baffling, and, ultimately, seducing his patrons with a kind of figurative painting that has surely become his trademark: women of fashion, women of society, women alone, middle-class women, and, perhaps, women of privilege, gathered together in small rooms, or intimately in a deux, or in European cafes, talking or not, sharing confidences or hairdressers, composed or reflective, perhaps making a simple joke or two. The serigraph "Cafe Select" is a rarity among Tarkay's oeuvre; it comes in the form of a three-paneled triptych, and gives far more of a sense of locale, of time, place and setting than most of his more abstract designs. Seated to the left, wearing a rich scarlet dress, is a lone woman, her hands resting in her lap, her face downcast, but not unhappy; behind her sit two more women at a further table, above them a kind of chandelier of lighted circlets, behind them, the beginnings of the kitchen at the back of the metropole. Center rear, we see more of the kitchen proper: stoves, accessories, a busboy leaning on a table and a waitress heading toward a table, which may well be that of the two, elaborately clothed women we see front and center. Here, Tarkay has placed himself squarely in the tradition from which he arises: the Fauvism - with its brilliant, often clashing colors, flattened composition, and sensuousness of form and line - established early in the century by Henri Matisse and his followers. People often mistake Tarkay for having his roots in Impressionism; he is, however, far more design-oriented, creating a melange of patterns, floral and architectural, lights, artificial and real, brilliantine colors, and formally placed figures that defy eye as they draw it inward, into the relaxed tumbrel of sights and sites on hand. The second of the three panels may be thought of as a centerpiece; as if to balance and symetrize the left-hand pane, the right-hand panel features a lone woman as well, seated in a bar area whose background is alive with tiles and crockery, jugs, and, further back, assorted liquors on their shelves, with a serving woman in orange behind the counter. Solitude meets solitude, left and right; the centerpiece brings a touch of sweetly joyful communion and commingling between two friend whose elegant gowns reveal the anticipatory pleasure they may have felt dressing for their meeting. All in all, Cafe Select is - although it certainly is that - a study in color and form of a particular interior geography, warm and relaxed, a refuge from a winter storm, perhaps, but still a commotion of the artist's imaginings.
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