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.