Hi, I Was Here and Thought of You

This book accompanies the exhibition currently on view (June–October 2026) at the Petah Tikva Museum of Art. The exhibition presents three series of painting-drawings — The Red Thread, Hide-and-Seek, and Hi, I Was Here and Thought of You—created both concurrently and sequentially, in ink and watercolor on paper.

The conceptual and emotional foundation underlying Rosenberg’s visual undertaking lies in culling, cutting, and assembling. The act of cutting, like a decree of fate, ultimately converges in a kind of cabinet of curiosities, conjuring up what had been cast off and lost in the drawers of passing time.

The earliest and most intimate of the three series, The Red Thread, is a family album of gazes in moments of seclusion and closeness, capturing the sense of time, pain, and love as they are lived in reality. The series Hide-and-Seek comprises works with a theatrical and uncanny dimension, centered on objects, places, or events whose connection appears arbitrary.

The series Hi, I Was Here and Thought of You, which lends its title to both the book and the exhibition as a whole, centers on trompe-l’œil—a painting technique that creates a realistic illusion. Rosenberg responds to this tradition by constructing images within images, in which visual imagery is joined with words against wooden surfaces. Within the self-aware spaces he creates, he brings together textual excerpts from well-known literary works dealing with war, destruction, and loss, and reflects on the deceptions of time and the fantastical manifestations of the violence of existence.

The accumulation of images weaves a course of passion and nostalgia for the act of representation, while simultaneously pointing to its impossibility, its failure. In their multiplicity, they embody painting-drawing as a labor of life, an act of survival.
—Adapted from the exhibition text by Dr. Irena Gordon