Tirtzah Bassel is an Israeli artist based in New York. Her drawings, paintings and site-responsive installations explore the relationships between power and space, and the permeable borders between public and private domains. Recent exhibition venues include Paper Positions, Berlin, Germany (2019), Slag Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2019, 2015, 2014), Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY (2018), Galerie Thomas Fuchs, Stuttgart, Germany (2018), Kunstverein Worms, Germany (2017), Volta NY (2017), FOR-SITE Foundation, California (2016), BRIC Arts Media Center, Brooklyn (2016), The Visual Arts Center, New Jersey (2015), Open Source Gallery, Brooklyn (2015),  The Firehouse Plaza Art Gallery at Nassua Community College, New York (2015) and Volta Basel, Switzerland (2015). Her work has appeared in Frieze Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Boston Globe, KQED, San Fransisco Chronicle, The Art Newspaper, Huffington Post and Arts in Bushwick, among others. Tirtzah holds an MFA from Boston University and she studied drawing and painting at the Jerusalem Studio School in Israel. She is a faculty member in the Visual and Critical Studies Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and a resident artist in the Chashama Workspace Program in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Tirtzah is represented by Slag Gallery in Brooklyn and Galerie Thomas Fuchs in Stuttgart, Germany.

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About the work in Collective Disquiet:

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"The Mama & Baby Yoga series comes from a desire for images that reflect my experience as a mother in all its complexity. I was inspired by a class that I took while on family leave after the birth of my second child. It was an important space for me, being with a group of women who shared a very particular set of experiences: pregnancy, birth, postpartum. Although I didn’t socialize much, I relished the opportunity to have a direct and visible relation to other mothers in a space designed to heal and to nurture.

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As in much of my work, these everyday encounters began to seep into my studio practice. I started to play with compositions of the women in the class, and sometimes I would sketch my daughter late at night when she was asleep. Cat Cow, Down Dog, Warrior Two, Sphinx. Strain, Repose. In each image I layer the physicality of the poses with their psychological and archetypal qualities. These are not Mother Earth types or Yummy Mummies. These are women that I saw at a yoga class in Brooklyn. Real women in a complex and evolving relationship with their own bodies, their babies, the world. The yoga class may be yet another kind of conformism to an unattainable ideal of motherhood. But sometimes, finding the pattern is itself an act of liberation."

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-from Tirtzah's recent interview in Art Spiel by Etty Yaniv