In the text accompanying the exhibition, the curator, Michal Shkhanai, wrote:

“… the private family scene paintings of Oded flood us with familiar memories: parents and their children in everyday moments or celebratory events, time stations, rites of passage from childhood to adulthood. With one brushstroke leading to another, the artist reconstructs his memories, his personal history but also our collective history. That history hidden in all our photo albums even before the age of digital folders. Photographs preserved in albums and not in clouds, sorted, chosen, and carefully printed and not shot and broadcast directly to the public eye.”

In the text accompanying the group exhibition “My Childhood Album,” displayed at Gordon Academic College, Haifa in 2022, the curator, Rina Gnosov, wrote:

“Oded Zidel returns to his childhood album following the passing of his father. The paging through the album’s pages and the desire to document childhood photographs arose from the need to cling to memories of the past and the memory of his father, lest they fade away. Zidel’s childhood album contains black-and-white photographs and faded color photographs, immortalizing family events that are familiar to many of us. The photographers of these family events had no artistic pretensions; however, in an era when the camera contained film with a limited number of shots, the captured moments were carefully chosen and documented the significant and important events in the family history.”

The paintings displayed here: “Purim in Sima’s Garden,” “Dor Beach,” and “Bar Mitzvah,” were painted in acrylic colors, inspired by those family photographs. In the dialogue the artist creates with his childhood photographs, Zidel disassembles the photographed scenes, rebuilds them anew, and transforms them into expressive paintings. In the transition from processing personal mourning to the craft of painting, Zidel operates with artistic freedom, unravels the significance of festive moments, stretches the boundaries of realistic painting, and creates amusing scenes that contain elements of exaggeration and humor. In the transformation undergone by the photographs, the colors are intensified, the depiction of the characters is concise, the space is flat, and the compositions are constructed from geometric surfaces, characteristic of Zidel’s artistic language.”