Mirrors, The Garden (3)

Joshua Borkovsky / Mirrors, The Garden (3)

Opening: 08/05/2014   Closing: 13/06/2014

Mirrors, The Garden (3), Exhibition view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2014
Mirrors, The Garden (3), Exhibition view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2014
Mirrors, The Garden (3), Exhibition view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2014
Mirrors, The Garden (3), Exhibition view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2014
Mirrors, The Garden (3), Exhibition view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2014
Mirrors, The Garden (3) ,Archive ink print, 150x100cm, 2013/14
Mirrors, The Garden (3) ,Archive ink print, 150x100cm, 2013/14
Mirrors, The Garden (3) ,Archive ink print, 150x100cm, 2013/14
Mirrors, The Garden (3) ,Archive ink print, 150x100cm, 2013/14
Mirrors, The Garden (3) ,Archive ink print, 150x100cm, 2013/14

The exhibition shows a group of new works, Photomorphosis photographs, from the Mirrors, The Garden (3) cycle.

 

The works of this cycle have been evolving over the years and The Garden motive is central to them.  The fields of meaning of the reflection, the echo and the repetition are fundamental to the images that are embodied in them.

 

Reflection is a repetition. The echo and the repetition structure, writes Hagi Kenaan, embodies “a possibility that the recurrent and repetitive appearing of the identical – of what looks the same – nevertheless consists in the new and the unexpected. More specifically, what the Mirrors, The Garden cycle of works presences“is not only the principle of repetition, but also the very existence of a dimension of difference. Without such a difference, the homogeneity of the self-identical would leave no room for the possibility of repetition.  Repetition requires a difference (or, in philosophical language: the difference is a condition of its possibility)”. This means that repetition, or reflection, which is essential to the Mirrors, The Garden   images “never appears as a mere duplication, but always already bears within it the echo of a difference that has inscribed itself into the movement of repetition”.

 

“Repetition is a movement that creates change and development while internalizing the law of the constant. This means that at its base repetition sustains an irresolvable tension between change and fixation, between heterogeneity and homogeneity. As such, repetition has two apparently contradictory aspects: on the one hand it creates a movement from the one to the many and, beyond any particular multiplicity, to the infinite; but on the other hand, the very condition for this movement – its modus operandi – is its surrender to the absolute hold of the One, the constant, the unchanging. Repetition, or reflection, is a kind of development whose fundamental form of appearance is the manifestation of that which remains itself”; Mirrors, The Garden.

 

*This exhibition completes Borkovsky’s comprehensive exhibition, Veronese Green, held at the Israel Museum last year, on which his works in the field of photography wasn’t included. The quotations above are taken from Hagi Kenaan essay, “Joshua Borkovsky: Painting as a Meta-Optics”, written for the exhibitions’ catalogue.

Works from the Gaby and Ami Brown Collection

Joshua Borkovsky / Works from the Gaby and Ami Brown Collection

Opening: 21/06/2013   Closing: 02/08/2013

Works from the Gaby and Ami Brown Collection, Exhןbition view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2013
Works from the Gaby and Ami Brown Collection, Exhibition view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2013
Works from the Gaby and Ami Brown Collection, Exhibition view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2013
Works from the Gaby and Ami Brown Collection, Exhibition view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2013
Works from the Gaby and Ami Brown Collection, Exhibition view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2013
Mixed Media, 111X83 cm, 2011
Pilgrimage, Mixed media and a gold leaf on fabric, 50x50cm,1985-1986
Untitled, oil and grafit on fabric, 142.5x142cm, 1985
Dream Stones, 40 cm
Untitled, Tempura and gold leaf on gesso on wood, 40x80, 2002

This exhibition of early works by the artist Joshua Borkovsky, all from the Gaby and Ami Brown collection, is a continuation or a “coda” to his comprehensive show that took place, last year, at the Israeli Museum in Jerusalem.

 

Ami Brown is considered as one of the leading and most important collectors in Israel. He was a business man and an initiator which comprehended and dealt with art-collecting in a total manner. The collection includes more than 3000 thousand works gathered in a period of five decades. Brown supported retrospective exhibitions, catalogues and artists books. His perception was insightful, he had a vast library of art trough which he studied and revised art subjects. He lived through art and was enclosed by it.

 

Borkovsky’s work predominantly features phantasmagoric imagery, such as the silhouettes of sailing ships, cartographic and geometric images. This preoccupation yielded crystal chandeliers reflected in mirrors as well as anamorphic photographs of gardens and recent cycles; Echo and Narcissus and Vera Icon.

 

The iconic characteristic of Borkovsky’s work calls to mind the voyage towards the deepest primordial craving of the sub-conscious. The miniaturization of the expanding and distancing movements on the pictorial surface makes viewing it like peering through a small window for traces of territories and objects which have already vanished from the range of vision.

 

The images disappear from their point of derivation in a way that divests them even more of their identity.

 

Borkovsky directs the viewer to a different mode of seeing which distinguishes itself as being ²different² from a direct visual perception of the world. It demands the viewer’s active presence and concentrated observation, leading him, paradoxically, to question seeing and to doubt the truth in what was reflected.

 

Borkovsky paints using traditional tempera technique, as traces of an ancient artistic tradition.

 

This gives his work an iconic quality, while designating it as a medium of memory an objectless and abstract sub-conscious realm.

 

Joshua Borkovsky was born in Israel, 1952. He studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art where he teaches as a senior professor. Since 1979 he showed in 15 solo exhibitions. His work was displayed in exhibitions, such as; 12 Biennale de Paris, Musee d’Art Modern de la Ville de Paris in 1982, Israel Museum, Jerusalem in 1987, 42 Venice Biennale, Italy in 1986, 12 Biennale of Sao-Paolo, Brazil in 1991 and In Between, Ein-Harod Museum of Art in 2005. Recent Group exhibitions include; Love at First Sight, The Vera, Silvia and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Israeli Art, The Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2000, Culture and Continuity, The Jewish Museum, New-York in 2002.

 

Last year he had a solo exhibition; Veronese Green, Paintings 1987 – 2012, at the Israeli Museum Jerusalem. Since 1998 he showed 4 exhibitions at In Noga Gallery.

 

Joshua Borkovsky has received numerous prestigious awards, amongst them; the Janet and George Jaffin Prize for Excellence in the Visual Arts, America-Israel Cultural Foundation in 1998 and the Ministry of Education and Culture Prize in 2004, Dizengoff Prize for Painting 2013.

 

Vera Icon

Joshua Borkovsky/ Vera Icon

Opening: 30/10/2008   Closing: 05/12/2008  

Vera Icon, Exhibition view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2008
Vera Icon, Exhibition view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2008
Vera Icon, Exhibition view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2008
Leda and the Swan 8, Ink Injection on Paper, Framed, 110x110cm, 2008
Leda and the Swan 6, Oil on Canvas,140x140cm, 2008
Vera Icon 6, Tempera on Gesso on Wood, 60x40cm, 2008
Vera Icon 3, Tempera on Gesso on Wood, 60x40cm, 2008

“Painting celebrates no other enigma but that of visibility.”

 

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Eye and Mind

 

In his new exhibition Joshua Borkovsky exhibits new paintings from the Leda and the Swan (Homage to Tintoretto) cycle and paintings from the Vera Icon cycle.

 

Borkovsky’s work predominantly features phantasmagoric imagery, such as the silhouettes of sailing ships and the cartographic images in his paintings of the early 1990s. In later years, this preoccupation yielded crystal chandeliers reflected in mirrors, anamorphic photographs of gardens and the recent paintings of the Echo & Narcissus cycle.

 

Borkovsky’s art demands the viewer’s active presence and concentrated observation, leading him, paradoxically, to question seeing and to doubt the truth in what is reflected.

 

The same is true of the paintings on view in the present show. The paintings from the Leda and the Swan cycle (oil on canvas) and the paintings from the Vera Icon cycle (Tempera on gesso on wood) continue the characteristic abstraction, concentration and reduction in Borkovsky’s work. It is a painting that in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French philosopher and thinker, “comes from the eye and addresses itself to the eye”. But it is also a painting that enables, confirms and simultaneously doubts seeing; the viewer is not certain what he sees, what its meaning is, and what the “true” image is. Echoic of Rashomon, the viewer remains uncertain – what is seen, what was really there, what the “true” image, the Vera Icon, is and if it is possible at all. The doubt that is eminent to these paintings and their creation becomes the viewer’s doubt, every viewer at any time.

 

* Vera Icon – “true image”: a concept, originally from Latin and Greek, that deals with the questions of the possibility and veracity of representation –of the divine representation in particular and any representation in general. This concept exists since the beginning of Christianity signifying the true presence of Christ through images known by their Greek name as acheiropoietos – not made by hand. One example is St. Veronica’s Vernicle (by erroneous etymological connection the name Veronica was associated with Vera Icon).

Echo and Narcissus

Joshua Borkovsky/ Echo and Narcissus

Opening: 18/05/2006   Closing: 25/06/2006

Echo & Narcissus, Mirrors, the Garden/ Anamorphoses, Installation view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2003
Echo & Narcissus, Mirrors, the Garden/ Anamorphoses, Installation view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2003
Echo & Narcissus, Mirrors, the Garden/ Anamorphoses, Installation view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2003
Echo & Narcissus, Mirrors, the Garden/ Anamorphoses, Installation view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2003
Echo & Narcissus, Mirrors, the Garden/ Anamorphoses, Installation view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2003
Untitled, Tempera and Gold Leaf on Wood Panel, 80x122cm, 2001
Untitled, Tempera and Gold Leaf on Wood Panel, 80x122cm, 2001
Untitled, Tempera and Gold Leaf on Wood Panel, 80x122cm, 2001
Untitled, Tempera and Gold Leaf on Wood Panel, 80x122cm, 2001

In his new exhibition opening May 25, 2003, Shuki Borkovsky exhibits works from the past two years: a series of photographs from the cycle:     “Mirrors, The Garden / Anamorphoses “ and paintings from the cycle :“Echo and Narcissus”. In the cycle : “Mirrors, The Garden / Anamorphoses”  the artist makes new and surprising use of the photographic medium in order to focus the viewer’s attention on questions of vision and doubt, central to his work of the past two decades.  Those works consisted of phantasmagoric images such as the silhouettes of sailing ships and the cartographic images in his paintings of the early 1990s and, later, the images of crystal chandeliers reflected in mirrors. These paintings demanded the active presence of the viewer, a concentrated observation that led him, paradoxically, to question seeing and to doubt the truth in what was reflected.

 

In his anamorphic photographs of gardens, the artist deals with similar questions. The original photograph is distorted to unsettle the viewer’s certainty of seeing the thing represented thereby. An additional distortion of the photograph utilizes the moiré effect that creates a “spiraling” and “whirlpool” effect in the image. (In standard, correct, prints the moiré effect is regarded as a fault, while Borkovsky makes this distortion a fundamental value of the image.) An enigmatic photographic image is attained, which suspends the gaze while questioning “correctness” of vision and, particularly, photography as representation.  “Truth” will be revealed, magically, only by correction of the representational fault through its reflection in a curved mirror: paradoxically, “truth” appears as a reflection, as likeness and illusion. The artist, the “salt merchant”, re-turns himself and the viewer to a state of doubt.

 

The diptychs from the “Echo and Narcissus”  cycle (oil paint and gold leaf on canvas) maximize abstraction, concentration and reduction that characterize Borkovsky’s work. As told by its name, the cycle is encoded with figurative images. The most abstract state is also the most figurative. Narcissus reaches awareness only through his reflection, and Echo is present in the world as a reverberation, a repetition. The viewer is in position to play a major role in charging these paintings with symbolic couples of all times and with further reflections.  The viewer can be either Echo or Narcissus, or both at the same time.

 

 

Anamorphosis

The technique of distorting an image in such a way that it can be viewed in its correct form from a particular point or through its reflection in a curved mirror. When seen directly it appears abstract and incomprehensible.

 

The system of central perspective not only rationalizes a relationship between objects within a picture, but also establishes a relationship between the viewer and the represented images. Anamorphoses are an extreme example of this subjectivization of the viewing process. The observer is first deceived by a barely recognizable image, and is then directed to a viewpoint dictated by the formal construction of the painting. Indeed, etymological origin of the word – from the Greek  ana(again), morph(shape) – indicates that the spectator must play a part and re-form the picture himself.

 

The image that appears, as if by magic, attracted artists, philosophers and poets for centuries. Durer, Leonardo da Vinci and Holbein (“The Ambassadors”) all created anamorphic images. Jean Cocteau writes of the anamorphic image as that ‘No man’s Land’ where poetry and science meet.

 

Anamorphic images, were considered ‘wonders’ and miracles of art imbued with mystical, theological and philosophical significance.

 

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the golden age of anamorphosis.

Mirrors, the Garden/ Anamorphoses

Joshua Borkovsky / Mirrors, the Garden/ Anamorphoses

Opening: 22/05/2003   Closing: 27/06/2003

Mirrors, the Garden/ Anamorphoses, Installation view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2003
Mirrors, the Garden/ Anamorphoses, Installation view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2003
Mirrors, the Garden/ Anamorphoses, Installation view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2003
Mirrors, the Garden/ Anamorphoses, Installation view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2003
Mirrors, the Garden/ Anamorphoses, Installation view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2003
Mirrors, the Garden/ Anamorphoses, Installation view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2003

Joshua Borkovsky

 

Mirrors, the Garden/ Anamorphoses
Photographs

 

Echo&Narcissus
Paintings

 

Shuki Borkovsky exhibits works from the past two years: a series of photographs from the cycle : “Mirrors, The Garden / Anamorphoses “ and paintings from the cycle : “Echo and Narcissus”. In the cycle : “Mirrors, The Garden / Anamorphoses” the artist makes new and surprising use of the photographic medium in order to focus the viewer’s attention on questions of vision and doubt, central to his work of the past two decades. Those works consisted of phantasmagoric images such as the silhouettes of sailing ships and the cartographic images in his paintings of the early 1990s and, later, the images of crystal chandeliers reflected in mirrors. These paintings demanded the active presence of the viewer, a concentrated observation that led him, paradoxically, to question seeing and to doubt the truth in what was reflected.

 

In his anamorphic photographs of gardens, the artist deals with similar questions. The original photograph is distorted to unsettle the viewer’s certainty of seeing the thing represented thereby. An additional distortion of the photograph utilizes the moir? effect that creates a “spiraling” and “whirlpool” effect in the image. (In standard, correct, prints the moir? effect is regarded as a fault, while Borkovsky makes this distortion a fundamental value of the image.) An enigmatic photographic image is attained, which suspends the gaze while questioning “correctness” of vision and, particularly, photography as representation. “Truth” will be revealed, magically, only by correction of the representational fault through its reflection in a curved mirror: paradoxically, “truth” appears as a reflection, as likeness and illusion. The artist, the “salt merchant”, re-turns himself and the viewer to a state of doubt.

 

The diptychs from the “Echo and Narcissus” cycle (oil paint and gold leaf on canvas) maximize abstraction, concentration and reduction that characterize Borkovsky’s work. As told by its name, the cycle is encoded with figurative images. The most abstract state is also the most figurative. Narcissus reaches awareness only through his reflection, and Echo is present in the world as a reverberation, a repetition. The viewer is in position to play a major role in charging these paintings with symbolic couples of all times and with further reflections. The viewer can be either Echo or Narcissus, or both at the same time.

 

Anamorphosis:
The technique of distorting an image in such a way that it can be viewed in its correct form from a particular point or through its reflection in a curved mirror. When seen directly it appears abstract and incomprehensible. The system of central perspective not only rationalizes a relationship between objects within a picture, but also establishes a relationship between the viewer and the represented images. Anamorphoses are an extreme example of this subjectivization of the viewing process. The observer is first deceived by a barely recognizable image, and is then directed to a viewpoint dictated by the formal construction of the painting. Indeed, etymological origin of the word – from the Greek ana(again), morph(shape) – indicates that the spectator must play a part and re-form the picture himself. The image that appears, as if by magic, attracted artists, philosophers and poets for centuries. Durer, Leonardo da Vinci and Holbein (“The Ambassadors”) all created anamorphic images. Jean Cocteau writes of the anamorphic image as that ‘No man’s Land’ where poetry and science meet. Anamorphic images, were considered ‘wonders’ and miracles of art imbued with mystical, theological and philosophical significance. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the golden age of anamorphosis.