Lea Avital
Dror Daum
Nicole Eisenman
Nogah Engler
Max Friedmann
Eti Jacobi
Talia Keinan
Efrat Klipshtein
Elisheva Levi
Orly Maiberg
Rami Maymon
Tal Mazliah
Liav Mizrahi
Galia Pasternak
Yehudith Sasportas
Nati Shamia-Opher
Esther Shneider
Ralf Ziervogel
Alexandra Zuckerman
Meir Gal’s solo exhibition show at Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art is the second part in a series titled “The Story of Israeli Art”. The first part was shown in 1995 at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
In this show Meir Gal continues to survey and document the writings of numerous writers, critics, curators, etc. active in the Israeli art world since the 1940’s. He selects various sentences and statements, uses them as quotations and places them in a new context alongside popular images from contemporary Israeli life. By doing so Gal reframes Israeli writing about art and lays out the textual conditions under which visual artists have been operating for decades.
Also included in the show are two objects titled “Sky Shield for the State of Israel” as well as “The Complete Jewish Lexicon” and “The Concise Israeli Lexicon”.
Meir Gal would like to acknowledge and thank all the writers quoted in this show, but are too numerous to mention.
In her current series of works, Orly Maiberg brings together the subjects of her paintings of the last ten years. Her paintings examine the boundaries between truth and illusion, portraits and landscapes, the internal and external, dreams and reality, the signifier and the signified.
For Maiberg, longings are processed into something lost in Tel-Aviv, lost in time. The process travels and takes place in the gap between photography and painting. The landscape and the figures come from the family photo-album, or are taken in the present by Maiberg herself. The paintings react to life in a direct and personal manner. Thematically, Maiberg dialogues with one of the fascinating directions in contemporary discourse: preoccupation with images of reality, in the connection between photography and painting, in the space between life and art, where everyday activity turns into artistic acts.
Time is frozen in photography and painting, very present yet longs for something different, different days. The aim of painting as raw material is to put together “facts,” “memories,” and “moments;” to confront situations and places and bring them to the surface, to consciousness. This is where past and present dissolve into one another: Maiberg with her father on the beach; Maiberg’s children on the beach; Tel-Aviv of the past; Tel-Aviv of the present. If in earlier works her figures were anonymous, without identity, then in the current series of works they receive a concrete characterization, personal and familial.
Orly Maiberg has developed in the last decade a unique and independent outlook on nature and urban nature. Her outlook is distinct, uncompromising. Maiberg’s sea landscapes are one of the most impressive achievements of the young Israeli painting. She is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts, New York. Her works have been shown in museums and galleries in Israel, the US and Europe.
The space is dark; 8 big barrels are standing on the floor. Each barrel is filled with water reflecting a full moon on its surface.
A video projection is screened on the ceiling which shows a spider web and a girl climbing it, trying to reach the moon in its middle. Reaching the moon, the girl disappears in it; at the same time the moons inside the barrels turn into eyes with sick-looking pupils.
The eye in the barrels blinks and slowly disappears until the water becomes black and empty. Then, big, black she-spider crawls out of the moon screened on the ceiling, and prowls around the web until everything becomes black.
The girl climbs to Luna; she climbs to the moon-eye. Whose eye? It might be her own eye or one of the eight eyes of the carnivorous she-spider, the tarantula. It might be the artist’s climb to herself, a destructive self-reflection or a self approval in denying oneself? She climbs the spider web as the mythological Arachne, the skilled weaving woman whom Athene turned into a spider. In a moment she will make it, in a moment she will see, in a moment her eye will close and with it the eight eyes of the spider, the one to offer a sacrifice and the victim.