• 
• Rafi Münz (Israel)
  a series of workshops

  High School of Arts, Mekhitar Sebastatsi Educational Complex, Yerevan

During his one-month residency program at the ‘Art Commune’, Rafi Münz organized a series of workshops with students of the High School of Arts (Mekhitar Sebastatsi Educational Complex). As a professional ceramist specializing in an ‘organic way of wood firing’, Münz held theoretical and practical classes on this method of ceramic production. The final production/project of the working group was based on the idea of face diagnosis and human characteristics. Münz offered the students to make short ‘characteristic summaries’ of one another to make personal ‘masks’ with initial three-dimensional computerized drawing of sketches and further translation to small size drafts in clay to be later enlarged to sculptures of actual size.

The idea of the project focused on the fragmented, fluid, and unstable human charactern. This can be observed in real life, as there are people who cannot get used to openness and the endless diversity of the offered roles. The person is compelled to cling to or choose a subcultural and even pathological role. The workshops were realized in ceramic studios of the High School of Arts.

Rafi Munz (b. 1938 Haifa, Israel) graduated the Bezalel School of art in Jerusalem (qualified also as art teacher); 1961-62 M.A at Central School of Arts and Crafts in London; 1964 – studies of ceramics & sculpture with Hedwig Grossmann and Rudi Lehman in Givatayim, Israel; 1964-1994 – co-founder and active artist in the Old Jaffa Artists’ Colony. Munz participated in numerous exhibitions in the local art gallery and in the artists’ Pavilion in Tel Aviv; 1971-85 – managing director at the Kibbutz Art Studios in Tel Aviv. Since 1994 Munz is a freelance ceramist and teacher in Givat Ada. Munz started practicing wood firing, mainly large sculptures in open air kilns since 2008.