February 21, 2019
In
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April 2, 2019
In
Ghosts of others
Naomi Leshem’s new body of work marks a departure from her long-time artistic practice, in which her personal biography served as a starting point. Ostensibly, the photographic subjects in the new works are not associated with her or her personal history, but rather drawn from the history of others – figures, objects and places. She taps into them and turns them into a body of work that while visually eclectic, maintains conceptual coherence.
The visual information presented in the photographs entails human stories, only a fraction of which was known to Leshem. The little she did know was the impetus that drove her to take the picture. The photographs capture a moment of observation, creating a disturbance in the timeless continuum of the serene place and forming a new eternal being that becomes a part of their biography.
Alongside places with a known history like German and French WWI trenches in Alsace or a building in Germany that used to house young Polish girls abducted as Aryan “breeding material,” Leshem also photographed anonymous objects like a 1930s Swedish plate or a Belgian pendant from the 1950s. Without knowing any of the thirty thousand soldiers who perished in the photographed trenches, nor any of the young Polish girls who were imprisoned in the building. Without knowing who were the owners of the objects, without being able to guess who ate off the plate, and whose neck the pendant adorned. The unknown will never come to light. The photographic act freezes a moment in the ongoing history of the place or of the object, and at the same time formulates a new biography. With that, the photograph becomes another link in the historical continuum, recounted through the artist’s transitory perspective and shaped by the influence that the content may bear on her impressions and imagination.
Gizela, the owner of a Zurich hotel housed in a fifteenth-century building, is an inseparable part of the hotel – like a living ghost that wanders through the building. The hotel itself hosts people and stories that will become ghosts with the passing time. Two photographs taken at the Swiss-German border, a historically fraught place with an almost pastoral present, also embody contemporary global dilemmas.
Some of the works were created using photographic ready-mades. Leshem collected postcards from the late 19th and early 20th centuries – taken and hand-painted by unknown photographers and exchanged between relatives or lovers. She chose to change their scale and mode of presentation – thereby instilling a new meaning into them, as they shift from an intimate and private representation to collective representation, immortalizing a human bond that breaks away from the local context.
The artist further used ready-made to compose a picture of six different photographs taken by a cell phone in Thingvellir, Iceland – the seat of the parliament founded in the early 10th where laws were legislated and implemented. In the spirit of Leshem’s current practice, the oldest place in the exhibition was treated with the most contemporary technology – in contrast to her usual technique – analogue photography of slides. With these photograms, Leshem wishes to present a history that is not completely known – neither to her nor to the viewer. The fraction of a second that she captures is a moment from the full past, the elusive present, and events that may come to pass in the future.
June 13, 2019
In
Art makes us happy- 25 years to noga gallery
Art Make us Happy / 25 years to noga gallery
Opening: 14/06/2019 Closing: 09/08/2019
Noga Gallery marks 25 years of fascinating and challenging activity with the 22 gallery’s artists.
The core of Noga Gallery’s activity and essence has always been presenting Israeli artists, with a focus on emerging women artists, and promoting them in Israel and abroad, as well as exposing the local audience to international artists. The mission of presenting groundbreaking artists whose art combines a range of techniques and controversial themes has been a guiding light for us throughout the years. From the early days of the gallery there was an emphasis on creating an emotional and intellectual aesthetic experience, one that stimulates and undermines issues and sharpens our perception of the world. The gallery maintains a diverse and substantial exhibition program and supports emerging artists as well as artists in the more advanced stages of their career.
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Noga Contemporary Art Gallery opened in 1994 on 34 Dizengoff Street, Tel Aviv, after a two-and-a-half-year activity from a private house in Herzliya. It was founded by Nechami Gottlib, and with the move to Tel Aviv, Adina Alshech joined the gallery’s management. In 2002 it moved to its current location on 60 Ahad Ha’am street.
The inaugural show in 1994 was accompanied by a special exhibition of 12 billboards on the façade of Habima Theatre and a catalogue. The exhibition was divided into two installments and featured works by the artists Smadar Eliasaf, Tamara Messel, Irit Hemo, Rivka Potchebutzky, Belu Simion Fainaru, Orly Maiberg, Hadar Maor Dgani, Nurit Avidov, Morel Derfler, Michal Heiman, Tito Leguisamo, and Max Friedman.
In its early years, the gallery presented solo shows by Irit Hemo, Tal Mazliach, Galit Eilat and Max Friedman, Smadar Eliasaf, Joshua Neustein, David Ginaton, Marilu Levin, Michal Heiman, Hila Lulu Lin, Nir Hod, Yehudit Sasportas, Miriam Cabessa, Larry Abramson, Orly Maiberg, Mosh Kashi and others. For many of these artists this was their first solo show.
The gallery was ahead of its time and held exhibitions that pushed the envelope, such as Max Friedman and Galit Eilat’s installation that simulated a bordello in the gallery, the work of Hila Lulu Lin who presented a giant nude photograph, Nicole Eisenman’s installation that included a large mural, the works of Talia Keinan that combine drawing and video, Keren Cytter’s provocative films, as well as the display of photography and video works, which was rather rare in the early 1990s and the display of distinctly noncommercial bodies of work. We were the first to exhibit the students of Israel Hershberg’s Jerusalem Studio School in Israel, among them Aram Gershuni, David Nipo, Eldad Farber, and more. This pluralism, which nowadays sounds natural, did not exist in the artistic climate of those years.
The gallery organized and produced a large benefit event whose proceeds were dedicated to Meira Shemesh z”l who needed a heart transplant, but by the time a heart was found it was too late.
The international artist Ori Gersht had his first solo exhibition at Noga Gallery, from which his career catapulted to worldwide recognition.
In 2000 the gallery was invited by the British Council to curate a show of young British artists. The exhibition, curated by Nechami Gottlib, was on view concurrently at Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art while Noga Gallery featured works by Sam Taylor-Wood, Sarah Lucas, Sarah Jones, Gillian Wearing, and Mat Collishaw – some of the leading artists of the YBA group.
With the move to the space on Ahad Ha’am Street we opened a special projects room, which allowed artists who are not in the gallery’s roster to present unique projects and installations for over a decade. Another expansion was made possible by using the gallery’s display window facing the street for performances and various installations.
The gallery’s artists have had solo exhibitions and participated in group shows in leading Israeli and international museums and art events, such as the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London, the Guggenheim and the Whitney Museum in New York, Pompidou Center in Paris, Hamburger Banhof in Berlin and more. Their works are included in leading museum, public, and private collections in Israel and around the world. Many have won awards from museums as well as the ministry of culture and sports.
The international artists who exhibited at the gallery include Nicole Eisenman, a San Francisco based artists group, a group of Cuban artists, Felipe Cezar, Gillian Wearing, Sarah Lucas, Kara Walker, Shahzia Sikander, Kader Attia. The artists Nicole Eisenman and Kader Attia, who were invited to show at the gallery in the early stages of their careers, have since gone on to gain wide acclaim, win prestigious awards, and show their works at the world’s leading museums.
The gallery participated and continues to participate in the world’s leading art fairs such as Art Basel, Art Basel Miami, FIAC Paris, Art Forum Berlin, the Armory Show in New York and more.
And on a personal note, art makes us happy, it makes us think, and challenges us.
We came to art with love and with love we will go on.
July 9, 2019
In
Uncategorized
When Faith Becomes Doubt, Group Exhibition Bar David Museum of Art and Judaica Kibbutz Bar’am
July 9, 2019
In
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Less is More-Israeli art Homage to Bauhaus, Group Exhibition, The Diaghilev Hotel
July 9, 2019
In
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Back to Artport, Group Exhibition, Artport, Tel Aviv
February 13, 2019
In
crown
Mosh Kashi / CROWN
Opening: 14/02/2019 Closing: 30/03/2019
Gallery Talk: 15/03/2019
“When I was a child, I used to catch the fish in the river with my hands. I was fascinated by their movement, their speed, how they sparkled, their colors. That was exactly what I wanted to catch in my hands.”
(Constantin Brancusi, “Conversations with Brancusi”, p. 46)
In his new cycle of works, Mosh Kashi expands his pictorial research and explores painting techniques and outlooks in surprising and dynamic large-scale works. The exhibition comprises several series of paintings, each invites the viewer to look from a different point of reference. This time, nature serves as a catalyst for an exploration of cosmic phenomena, while the studio acts as the connecting link in the transformation that they go through before they reach the painted canvas.
The central series in the exhibition is Light Particles. This series serves as an index of Mosh Kashi’s earlier painting processes, which consisted mainly of isolating objects from nature around him and placing them at the center of the canvas, keeping to a minimal color palette, and creating a world that has no place or time. Whereas in this series the gaze turns to look at the celestial sphere, examining the speed and frequency of celestial bodies through pictorial subjects whose visible characteristics are energy and movement, refracted light, and sudden bursts that glimpse fleetingly, following their own routine and structure.
At the same time, a series of panoramic paintings that explore mass and weight through a colorful relationship in paintings of light and darkness complements the sharpness of the Light Particles series. The painting’s appearance is dictated by the misty image, the slow, almost imperceptible heavy movement of the mass of light and darkness.
The third series of works focuses on dense construction of a colorful range as an expression of painting abstraction. The presence of color in this series manifests itself with flashes of color waves, capturing layers of bright light and total darkness, as if they were the essence of the blue sky spectrum.
Each series in the new cycle of paintings is executed in a different method that indicates the totality of phenomena in the universe. At the same time, it also illuminates the possibility that the pictorial tactic in this instance distills natural phenomena and gives them an independent entity, one that is separate from the cosmic space, an action that conjures up the studio as a parallel universe governed by its own orders.
Reality outside the studio and the illusion of painting in the studio underscore the differences between them but at the same time also allow the cosmic moment to take shape through painting as an imaginary existence of a visual formulation.
July 9, 2019
In
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A Look at the promised land (Zevat Halav), Group Exhibition, Beit Hankin Art Gallery, Kfar Yehoshua
February 21, 2019
In
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Mature Content, Solo Exhibition, Museion, Museum of modern and contemporary art, Bolzano, Italy
July 9, 2019
In
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