June 27, 2006
In
October 27, 2006
In
Metropolis
December 7, 2006
In
Bear Hug
The “Bear hug” paintings feature crowded places; cut out images implanted into the paintings. Images of figures and animals invade each others space, while completely ignoring each others presence. Every image bears its past ethology; however, once inside the collage its identity becomes confused. The image balance is disrupted by exaggerations and extensions; it regains its equilibrium within the constructed set of the painting.
Painting images that come from different spheres in the real world allows their ultimate assimilation in “death”. For me, this is one of the magnificent powers of painting: to show a history of an image, to preserve it, but also erase it – to create a new image. The new image expresses a humoristic, mocking tone coming from the weird crisscross of figures, their expressions and surroundings. The painting “puts” a circus like show – unbelievable, and absurd. Each painting is trying to tell a joke – a bad joke or a pointless gag.
A theatre show, set, image display and directing operate as milestones on the way to the painting. I cut out some pieces of the puzzle, put up a set, add lots of make up or blood stains. The flesh disappears; there are only colors imitating pink, white or brown skin. Patches of color and shine make for furs, hair and blood. The figures are frozen in the ultimate act, at the peak of pathos, forever.
The images were collected from the Internet, magazines, films and edited photographs, adapted and mashed into a collage and then into a painting. For each work, a fictitious storyboard is built with layers of drawing, photograph and color.
No painting comes out the way it was planned. The medium, size and the painting style impose their own constraints. So a small, naïve photograph of a horse galloping through a field becomes a big, flat and detached horse figure.
The body of the image, its fragility, unawareness and intimacy collapse and re-erect. The images are pulled together by links of heavy and light, over exposure, paleness and darkness. It seems that in the heat of darkness it is easier to “rape” vulnerable images. The sole authentic quality an image carries from its previous life is its expression, the very same expression for which it was chosen.
“Bear hug” simulates a chain reaction in the paintings, like a collage that is compulsive. An image is embraced too strongly until it has no choice but to surrender, to kneel before its opponent. It is an allegedly warm and tender expression of a brutal and aggressive act. And so images confront in the paintings hugging each other too strong till overtake that remains undetermined.
November 3, 2006
In
Repulsion
Keren Cytter / Repulsion
Opening: 03/11/2006 Closing: 02/12/2006
Keren Cytter’s (born 1977 in Tel Aviv, lives and works in Amsterdam) artistic practice has gained an outstanding international recognition in the past three years. Since completing her post graduate studies in the studio program de Ateliers in Amsterdam, Cytter held solo presentations at Galleria d‘Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo (2006), Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich (2005), Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main (2005), Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2004), and an upcoming solo project in Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2007). Keren Cytter is also the author of the novels: The Sunset of Yesterday (Shadurian, Tel Aviv, 2003) and The Man Who Climbed Up the Stairs of Life and Found Out They Were Cinema Seats (Lukas & Sternberg NY-Berlin, 2005). Keren Cytter has just been awarded the Baloise Art Prize at the “Art Statements” sector of Art 37 Basel. Keren Cytter’s first feature film NEW AGE will be released in The Netherlands in winter 2007.
Keren Cytter is engaged in representations of social realities through experimental storytelling in which she cultivates radical subjectivity as a challenge to the restraints and rules of genres and language, both written and cinematic. Recalling amateur home-movies and video diaries, her films and videos are made of re-composed elements of the everyday, of impressions, memories, imaginings, desires and dreams. The scripts are part of the stories themselves, and the story in turn is always a story of the clash between a (perfect) script and an (imperfect) reality.
Cytter, who writes all her own scripts, deliberately uses an over-poetic and non-realistic spoken language to enhance the artificiality of the film making process. This eloquent and expressive speech is at odds with the videos’ documentary style, which includes lots of wobbly, hand-held, out-of-focus shots, culminating in the camera getting knocked over.
The subject matter of her work is the stuff of relationships -loss, loving, Ionging, friendship, betrayal – much of it culled from her own or her friends’ lives. While the language may be bookish, the topics are pure soap opera, and the disjunction between the words and images adds to the melodramatic flavour. Repetition is an important factor in Cytter’s work, both in language and montage. Phrases are stated more than once, sometimes slightly altered, and particular shots are occasionally repeated. People re-enter the same room several times, although the plot seems to move forward normally. More layers are added visually by the use of colour, whether by stripping it away entirely to black and white or by accentuating and saturating it.
Cytter deconstructs traditional narrative structures by superimposing video clips with nonharmonized voice and sound sequences that are often doubled up with subtitles, and in this way conjures up an often surprising and always arbitrary reality. Usually produced in a cheap and simple way, the videos imitate the genre of documentaries and yet the quotes and clichés taken from popular culture, film, Pop music and trash literature expand them, propelling them into a purely fictitious world where our ability to grasp things is sorely tested.
(the text was adapted from press releases from KW 2006, Kunsthalle Zurich 2005 and Frieze 92, 2005 by Amanda Coulson).
Repulsion consists of three short films, and is based on the Roman Polanski’s Repulsion from 1965. In the original film the main character, played by Catherine Deneuve, works at a beauty salon in London and lives with her sister. When the sister is away on a trip to Italy with a boyfriend, Catherine murders her pursuer and throws him in a bath full of water. Her landlord comes for the rent and tries to sleep with her, but she kills him too rolling his body inside a carpet. When the sister returns, she finds the two bodies and Catherine unconscious under a bed. On the floor there is an old family photo with a girl that looks demented.
After seeing Polanski’s film Keren Cytter “decided to make three short movies that focused upon the protagonist and the two supporting characters. The interaction between the three characters would create tensions that led to a cruel death at the end of each movie. The characters would change parts – the killer in one movie would be the victim in the second, and the witness in the third, and vice versa. This way the three short movies would serve as three layers of one movie that had no plot. [She] recalled the actions and objects from the original movie that had left the deepest impression on [her] and decided these would be the actions presented in [her] three short movies.”[1]
The movies don’t tell any story, and the actions of the characters are arbitrary. The actors change their roles in each movie, thus creating a perfect symmetry. The movies are meant to describe the feelings of disgust, alienation and claustrophobia. They focus on a girl, who when left alone suddenly becomes engulfed by feelings of uncontrollable repulsion, suffocation that clouds all reason, and paranoia – those feelings slowly drive her away from life.
[1] From “Repulsion” by Keren Cytter, Metropolis M #5, 2006
September 14, 2006
In
Liquidation
Ori Gersht / Liquidation
Opening: 14/09/2006 Closing: 27/10/2006
Photographs titled “Liquidation” and a film named “The Forest” are two complementary parts of a single body of work, which is represented in a new Monograph titled “The Clearing”.
The works, which were created in 2005 at the remote southwest regions of Ukraine, will be shown simultaneously at two venues, the photographs at Noga Gallery while the film at the Tel Aviv Museum of Contemporary Art.
During the past year this body of work was exhibited at The Photographers Gallery, London, CRG Gallery, New York, Angles Gallery, Los Angeles, Marco Museum, Spain and will soon be presented at the Architecture, Art and Landscape Biennial of the Canaries, Canary Island.
“Crammed with memories, and at once filled with forgetting: his memories, even recent ones, were faded, they had hazy outlines, they overlapped in this effort of his, as if someone were making drawings on the blackboard, then only half erasing them, before making new ones on top of the old. Perhaps this is how a man remembers his life when he is a hundred, or how the patriarchs, who were nine hundreds, remembered. Perhaps memory is like a bucket; if you want to cram into it more fruit that it will hold, the fruit is crushed.”
(pp 213-214, If Not Now When, Primo Levi)
This exhibition features new photographic works that were created over the course of a series of journeys to the small towns of Kosov and Kolomia in the region of Galicia in southwest Ukraine.
As with his previous work, Gersht is exploring landscapes imbued with personal, intimate and historic resonance in a journey into the unknown, into the past, and into the private flitting memories that refuse to fade away.
The photographs were taken in areas that were for many generations a home to prosperous Jewish communities and where once Gersht’s relatives found a brief but harsh refuge from Nazi persecution. In his photographs Gersht attempts to look at the surrounding landscape in the light of the historical events, to confront pastoral beauty with the atrocities of the past, the concrete experience with the subjective, psychological one. Consequently, the photographic process becomes a struggle between recording and erasing, describing and forgetting. In order to achieve such visual dialectics, Gersht exposed the film for long durations of time attempting to penetrate the surface and capture the essence of these places. However, the effect is reverse: the long exposures bleached the film; the light of the sun first created and then destroyed the images, erasing them from the surface of the celluloid. This process of creating and destroying aims to redefine the relationship between objective and subjective, and to highlight the helplessness of photography in relation to the past.
In addition to the photographs, Gersht also shot “The Forest”, a 13’ film,
that was inspired by the German Romantic movement, and particularly by the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. Romanticism that was later adopted and distorted by the Nazi regime is the trigger for a discussion about culture and nature, memory and forgetting, and the marking of an epic catastrophe. In contrast to the ephemeral and gentle photographs, the visual appearance of the film is sharp and concrete accompanied by an immense threatening sound. Through such formal opposition the photographs and the film converse and complement each other.
May 18, 2006
In
Echo and Narcissus
Joshua Borkovsky/ Echo and Narcissus
Opening: 18/05/2006 Closing: 25/06/2006
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.
March 30, 2006
In
Cronos
Mosh Kashi / Cronos
Opening: 30/03/2006 Closing: 12/05/2006
My new cycle of works opens yet another chapter that deals with nature and flora not as a record but as a document that engages emotions on physical as well as mental levels.
Dark fields, black trees, thickets spread as a torn sheet exposing the hidden light and the background, hallucinatory trees and shadows, golden porcelain balls (that will not be exhibited) coated with pure gold, and balls with meticulously painted twigs.
Darkness as a substance provides the axis in this body of works. The horizon, the link between land and sky and the pale light that flickers like a pearl define the wide shadowy fields and the dark saturated sky above them.
A significant part of those works are the black fields (Cronos); heavy and charged, they linger as a black thick mist marking the horizon in the gallery space. The viewer moves from a black field to a green shadow, back to a dark tree and then to an endless thicket of green twigs through which glints an infinite space.
There are other works with bare sprigs on a dark background illuminated by the faint night light; they break up the dark space reaching to the bottom of darkness which is light (Sintra).
The dark, hallucinatory trees on a red background (Crimson) are far away in a red, hot atmosphere – the red, thick air wraps the lone tree that merges with the horizon of the heavy earth. The dark trees seem like stakes in the first light of dawn or the last light of day, or pines, dark with their thick and mysterious branches.
These works do not express the concrete, earthly plane of nature, but rather refer to mental imagery like the dark, weightless air that touches the heavy earth on a blurry horizon.
The blurred leaves and the almost hallucinatory branches become an allegory to the feelings of void and reality; together they reveal a fractal space free of cultural prescriptions. This reality is a fractal, a unique shape born again and again, eternally.
February 17, 2006
In
Conceptual Arcadia
David Ginton / Conceptual Arcadia
Opening: 17/02/2006 Closing: 24/03/2006
This is the third time I exhibit only one type of images, the backside of a painting. In the first exhibition (Trompe-L’oeil, Yanko Dada Museum, 1996) they were photographs of paintings’ backsides from the Tel Aviv Museum collection. In the second one (The English Painter, Noga Gallery, 2002) they were paintings of the backside of imaginary paintings with texts describing the concealed “painting” on the front. Those texts were usually taken from back covers of books about art or literature, and they described and praised the book (the painting). Therefore, those texts became the embodiment of ekphrasis – verbal descriptions of paintings that at the same time turn into talking paintings.
The current exhibition, Conceptual Arcadia, is about the name of the painting. A painting is born from its name. When there is an appropriate name for a painting, I can paint its backside. Usually it is a name of an existing painting by another painter, like the Wood on its Head (Georg Bacelitz) or The Last Painting of a Century (Kenny Scharf). I painted the backside not of the original painting, but of a virtual copy I made of the original. There is no painting the name refers to, so it is in fact a painting within a painting, or a frame painting as a frame story. Through their names the paintings cover different issues concerning art, politics, or personal matters, and the texts range from minimal informative to literal citations, political “chatter” and theology. At a certain stage I decided to express verbally the ease of creation of those paintings through their names as a conceptual arcadia. This was an opportunity to settle my debt with conceptual art and to relay to my own beginning; it was done in two works. One is I after Ich by the French artist, Ben Vautier, that I saw during my first visit abroad in 1973 when I entered the art world. The French version of the painting was created in 1965. Second is the first backside painting I made after my own painting, my first painting from 1973 that was a text work, Paint on Paint…
My encounter with a painting’s backside was made by coincidence when I visited a storage room in Givon Gallery, but I have pursued it for 12 years since experiencing it as a process of iconoclasm: a painting without an image, except for frame and canvas, mainly writing. The backside of a painting is where artists tend to write their name, the name of the painting, and date. Essentially, it is also the details that appear on labels next to the paintings in museums or in books. What is the backside of a painting? What is a label without the painting? The backside is what we are allowed to see of God, and the painting is like a deity (“You shall not make for yourselves… any image”). When the linguist, Emil Benvenist, described the “desecration of God’s name”, he wrote that “the only thing we have from God is his name”. So it is with the reversed painting – all we have from the painting is its name. The name of the painting is a painting.
January 13, 2006
In
Secrets
Efrat Klipshtein / Secrets
Opening: 13/01/2006 Closing: 10/02/2006
The concrete wall, still exhibited as a whole unit, is there to separate the fragments on each side of it: both those broken from within and those broken from without. The chaos exhibited on the different canvases represents an anthology of repressed and forgotten memories of whole tools that were removed from their natural environment. Halak’s metaphors, referred to by Linda Nochlin as “fragments, ruins and mutilation echo the mourning for past grandeur as a whole, which can only be revisited through its remains amidst modernity”1.0 Those fragments beckon us to descend to the saturated earth and observe the fragmented tools – those cracks in our lives.
Halak attempts to cope with the absurdity of what he sees against the wall while expressing his yearning for unity. In a world created out of fragments and the inherent contradiction that spumes forth through the invisible cracks in the concrete wall, Halak suggests correcting a point of view — one that makes meeting with a transparent and imperfect past more feasible.
1 Nochlin, Linda, (2001), The Body in Pieces: The Fragments as a Metaphor of Modernity, Thames and Hudson
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