David Strauss was born in Germany. He immigrated to Palestine in 1935, and settled in Kibbutz Ramat Hakovesh. His time at the Buchenwald concentration camp left its indelible imprint, and when he arrived at the kibbutz he was already an eccentric loner. In 1962 he was committed to the psychiatric institution at Kfar Ganim, where he spent the rest of his life.

- The discovery -
Artist and art critic Meir Agassi (1947-1998) was born and raised in Kibbutz Ramat Hakovesh. While processing distant childhood memories, he realized, with hindsight, that Strauss was an outsider artist. The small works he had seen hanging on the walls of Strauss's room one day disappeared when he was sent to Kfar Ganim. In homage to the memory of David Strauss, who may have been the unconscious motivation for Agassi's profound interest in outsider art, Agassi created works in his name for his virtual "Meir Agassi Museum."

- The work -
David Strauss's 39 works presented in the current exhibition were created
by Meir Agassi: they reconstruct D.S.'s works as etched in Agassi's memory ever since the only time he had seen them hanging on the walls of his kibbutz shack, combined with the inf luence of other outsider artists he saw over the years, primarily Adolf W.lf li and Mart.n Ram.rez. The painterly surface is geographical maps on which diverse images are drawn in pencil, hatchwork, texts, musical notes, and mathematical formulae of sorts. Pages from old books, newspaper clippings, and pictures are attached to the paper sheets to create an inner frame. Stains of coffee and humidity complement a picture of hectic, obsessive, emotionally dense practice.