Spring Exhibitions
01.05.2021 – 04.07.2021
Gil Goren
Floods in the palm of my hand | Installation
A solo exhibition is a like a capsule of personal essence. It exists as a ‘piece’ borrowed from the artist, from their being, with the intention of producing an experience. Gil Goren is an artist whose complex life capsule, memories and their practical processing method are reflected in the objects placed in the exhibition space.
Prominent motifs connect the different parts of the exhibition: the surface: the crumpled paper, the area of Masada, the collection, the surface area of the flood landscapes, even the surface of the hand. Each element can also be an elevation landmark (physical and symbolic). The sum of the elements forms the surface of the exhibition. Black ink passes as a common thread between all the fragments. Ink is material, dripping and flowing, and so are the tools in making drawings and video, the means with which the painter works. As spectators we must pull our own Ariadne thread from the fragments so that it connects into a new memory.
A video is a video installation, that is: an animation based on ink drawing and depicts a constitutive childhood experience of a flood in Wadi Beer Sheva. The animation of flood paintings, the directions of flow, its intensity and speed, is the artist’s form of regaining control in the face of the uncontrollable power of nature.
A slanted arm comes out from one of the walls, hollow, realistically painted, dripping black ink (and reminiscent of the Pieta: Mary holding Jesus right after he was taken down from the cross) towards a landscape of backs made of crumpled paper. In the center of the space is an installation of a familiar table-mountain: Masada, perched on an artificial desert cliff. On the one hand it is elevated, and on the other hand the scale creates a diminishing, to dimensions where we can perhaps grasp the mountain, deal with the myth, and ask ourselves: Is this a collective memory of heroism? Of death? Or one that illustrates the price of sacrifice? What can remain etched in the collective memory as a success, as a victory of individuals, can also be a disaster, a tragedy that dictates an entire life. Flood in the wadi – can charm the eye and ear in winter but can also cut off life.
Drawings in black: The choice of black color is present in the space. Minimal color for memory, almost like a dream. Black and white. “Black ink is the tool for the expression of words and language and is the fuel for igniting the story of historical events, which are the energy for creating collective memory, which becomes personal truth, food for creating good and evil, right and wrong. Food for creating heroism” (from a conversation with G. Goren)
Personal memory is both truth and delusion. It is imbued with fantasies, feelings, desires and distortions of time. The collective memory is engineered and therefore is a fiction that we must unravel every day. To pull the threads of personal memory out from of the bigger picture.
Dark. Room
Sasha Serber, Eshchar Hanoch Kliengbiel, Malka Inbal, Avi Tzarfati
Group exhibition
In each of the four exhibition rooms, the viewer is invited to experience a different essence of darkness, a different tier of reference to the phenomenon of darkness: At the physical, cultural, and psychological levels. Darkness is not just a state of absence of light in the physical sense.
In Western culture, darkness represents spaces in which knowledge or morals are absent and are usually filled by fear and evil. At the same time, a protected moment in physical darkness may allow for relaxation, lingering, and devotion. It is interesting in this context to quote the Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï: (Gyula Halász): “The night offers, not teaches. The night finds us and surprises us because of its strangeness; it releases in us the forces that during the day are controlled by reason.”
The rooms in which the exhibition is presented are not dark rooms in the lateral sense of the term – that is, the room in which the work of developing analogue photographs is carried out – the expulsion of the images from darkness into the light in a structured chemical process.
If the moment of image capture by a camera seems to be the moment of conception of the photographic work, then the darkroom is the delivery room. At the end of the development process the photographer meets the object of their work again, this time as an independent object detached from space-time and standing on its own. The dark room is an aisle room, a mezzanine room, an ex-trattoria, where art is neither made nor observed.
In the work of the painter, draftsman, video artist, or sculptor, such a stage of maturation does not exist at all. Despite its absence, these media have many and varied forms of reference to the subject of darkness, some of which are exemplified in the exhibition.
Doron Fishbein & Efi Gen – exhibition curators
Ofri Marom
Burned | Painting
Ofri Marom always draws flowers. The flower series inventory was built gradually: safflowers, chrysanthemums, anemones, cyclamen, fragrant patches, sunflowers and more. A broad, painted Israeli dictionary, which finds beauty in the small, the abandoned, the natural, in that it is ‘only a flower’ and on the other hand it is also the essence of Israeliness: light, sky, earth and space.
The flower paintings are created on a table in the studio or at home, as a meditative action, connecting her with her great love. The flowers come to the substrate alongside other work done in other formats, intense, almost abstract, urban, with grids and many layers of color.
As a child, a member of Kibbutz Hatzor, she used to walk with her grandfather in the kibbutz’s sunflower fields. On each trip she was allowed to pick one sunflower. Decades later, the memory of the sunflower was burned on the paper, as if the sunflower had been burned and melted onto it. The series of sunflowers is unusual in the flower painting inventory. A separate, different and poetic section.
The works are painted on parchment paper. The choice of a substrate of paper with transparency and a presence that almost disappears, allows a sunflower to glow, but also poses a problem: how will the color of the oil be ‘perceived’? What happens to paper when it meets a less thick and more liquid material? Will it shrink? Will it respond to the page?
דן בירנבוים
רישום
על גבי קיר במבואת הגלריה, מציג האמן והאדריכל דן בירנבוים רישומים נבחרים מתוך עבודות אחרונות. עבודתו הרישומית עסקה בעיקר בתיאור נוף, ישראלי. נופים אשר התעלמו בדרך כלל מנוכחות אנושית. הפעם, נדמה שהאמן מביט אל תוכו. מתוך התנועה המיומנת של מכחול יבש וצבע שחור על נייר, הוא מצליח להעביר אותנו דרך ציור עין, גם אל מה שהעין רואה (העין כמייצגת את המבט, שולחת בעקיפין גם אל דיון פילוסופי עמוק על המבט) [1]. אנחנו חשים את התנועה המתעקלת של היד ורואים את גלגל העין, אישון, דמות שנקלטה במבט. האדמה עליה ניצבים שלושה ברושים (מוטיב ביצירתו וסמל ישראלי) התעגלה באופן בוטח, עד שנדמה שכך יש לציירה. דמות נקלטת בעין, משוכפלת לדמויות רבות ואנחנו מתבוננים ברישום קהל רב של יחידים הנדמים כגופים אורגנים על צלחת פטרי במעבדה. הרישום נכנע לתנועה עגולה, טבעית, כמעט שלמה, שהופכת לבסיס, למקום ממנו נצרבים הדימויים,העין. רישומיו של דן מאופיינים בתחושה דואלית אצל הצופה . תנועת המכחול לצד הקפאת הרגע ונדמה שאנחנו נמצאים על סיפו של דבר מה שיש לבחון אותו שוב. רגע חשוב. הבחירה בטכניקה שהיא כמעט וקליגרפית, יוצרת רגע ציורי, יחידי, מרתק. אלו מתעגלים יחדיו לכדי סממנים חדשים ונוספים ביצירה עשירה, רבת שנים ומרתקת של אמן ישראלי שמצליח לזקק עבודתו כקליגרף יפני, ועם זאת לייצר תחושה מקומית השייכת לכאן ועכשיו.
[1] “הנראה והבלתי נראה” (1964) -מוריס מרלו-פונטי העמיד את הגוף במרכז החוויה התפיסתית של היותנו בעולם. לדעתו, ראייה היא חוויה גופנית, בדרך של דואליות והיפוך: גופי הרואה הוא גם הגוף הנראה על ידי האחר. חוויית היסוד של היותי בעולם היא זו של סובייקט צופה שהוא גם נצפה. גם לאקאן ( 1964, סמינר 11) התייחס להתבוננות: המביט הוא חלק מתמונה רחבה יותר, המבליעה בה את המביט בהיותה כוללת את הצופה שהוא תמיד גם נצפה, ותמיד נמצא גם בשדה המבט של האחר.
Tamar Shalit - Avni
Perpetuum Mobile | Video Movie Night
Two young men, off-duty soldiers or perhaps teenagers, are climbing the big dune. The duo ‘conquers’ the dune again and again in different manners, and the climb transforms from realistic to absurd. Perpetuum Mobile, the eternal movement of the Israeli myth sends the climbers on a Sisyphean quest.
Video, 4:52 minutes, 2020
The film is part of a future trilogy following ‘Spring Worship’ (screened at the gallery in May 2019)
The ‘Movie Night’ project allows passers-by to watch a short video work even when the gallery is closed.
In this way there is a certain ‘leak’ between the inside and the outside.
Curator of the ‘Movie Night’ project – Doron Fishbein
Spring Exhibitions
01.05.2021 – 04.07.2021
Gil Goren
Floods in the palm of my hand | Installation
A solo exhibition is a like a capsule of personal essence. It exists as a ‘piece’ borrowed from the artist, from their being, with the intention of producing an experience. Gil Goren is an artist whose complex life capsule, memories and their practical processing method are reflected in the objects placed in the exhibition space.
Prominent motifs connect the different parts of the exhibition: the surface: the crumpled paper, the area of Masada, the collection, the surface area of the flood landscapes, even the surface of the hand. Each element can also be an elevation landmark (physical and symbolic). The sum of the elements forms the surface of the exhibition. Black ink passes as a common thread between all the fragments. Ink is material, dripping and flowing, and so are the tools in making drawings and video, the means with which the painter works. As spectators we must pull our own Ariadne thread from the fragments so that it connects into a new memory.
A video is a video installation, that is: an animation based on ink drawing and depicts a constitutive childhood experience of a flood in Wadi Beer Sheva. The animation of flood paintings, the directions of flow, its intensity and speed, is the artist’s form of regaining control in the face of the uncontrollable power of nature.
A slanted arm comes out from one of the walls, hollow, realistically painted, dripping black ink (and reminiscent of the Pieta: Mary holding Jesus right after he was taken down from the cross) towards a landscape of backs made of crumpled paper. In the center of the space is an installation of a familiar table-mountain: Masada, perched on an artificial desert cliff. On the one hand it is elevated, and on the other hand the scale creates a diminishing, to dimensions where we can perhaps grasp the mountain, deal with the myth, and ask ourselves: Is this a collective memory of heroism? Of death? Or one that illustrates the price of sacrifice? What can remain etched in the collective memory as a success, as a victory of individuals, can also be a disaster, a tragedy that dictates an entire life. Flood in the wadi – can charm the eye and ear in winter but can also cut off life.
Drawings in black: The choice of black color is present in the space. Minimal color for memory, almost like a dream. Black and white. “Black ink is the tool for the expression of words and language and is the fuel for igniting the story of historical events, which are the energy for creating collective memory, which becomes personal truth, food for creating good and evil, right and wrong. Food for creating heroism” (from a conversation with G. Goren).
Personal memory is both truth and delusion. It is imbued with fantasies, feelings, desires and distortions of time. The collective memory is engineered and therefore is a fiction that we must unravel every day. To pull the threads of personal memory out from of the bigger picture.
Dark. Room
Sasha Serber, Eshchar Hanoch Kliengbiel, Malka Inbal, Avi Tzarfati Group exhibition
In each of the four exhibition rooms, the viewer is invited to experience a different essence of darkness, a different tier of reference to the phenomenon of darkness: At the physical, cultural, and psychological levels. Darkness is not just a state of absence of light in the physical sense.
In Western culture, darkness represents spaces in which knowledge or morals are absent and are usually filled by fear and evil. At the same time, a protected moment in physical darkness may allow for relaxation, lingering, and devotion. It is interesting in this context to quote the Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï: (Gyula Halász): “The night offers, not teaches. The night finds us and surprises us because of its strangeness; it releases in us the forces that during the day are controlled by reason.”
The rooms in which the exhibition is presented are not dark rooms in the lateral sense of the term – that is, the room in which the work of developing analogue photographs is carried out – the expulsion of the images from darkness into the light in a structured chemical process.
If the moment of image capture by a camera seems to be the moment of conception of the photographic work, then the darkroom is the delivery room. At the end of the development process the photographer meets the object of their work again, this time as an independent object detached from space-time and standing on its own. The dark room is an aisle room, a mezzanine room, an ex-trattoria, where art is neither made nor observed.
In the work of the painter, draftsman, video artist, or sculptor, such a stage of maturation does not exist at all. Despite its absence, these media have many and varied forms of reference to the subject of darkness, some of which are exemplified in the exhibition.
Doron Fishbein & Efi Gen – exhibition curators
Ofri Marom
Burned | Painting
Ofri Marom always draws flowers. The flower series inventory was built gradually: safflowers, chrysanthemums, anemones, cyclamen, fragrant patches, sunflowers and more. A broad, painted Israeli dictionary, which finds beauty in the small, the abandoned, the natural, in that it is ‘only a flower’ and on the other hand it is also the essence of Israeliness: light, sky, earth and space.
The flower paintings are created on a table in the studio or at home, as a meditative action, connecting her with her great love. The flowers come to the substrate alongside other work done in other formats, intense, almost abstract, urban, with grids and many layers of color.
As a child, a member of Kibbutz Hatzor, she used to walk with her grandfather in the kibbutz’s sunflower fields. On each trip she was allowed to pick one sunflower. Decades later, the memory of the sunflower was burned on the paper, as if the sunflower had been burned and melted onto it. The series of sunflowers is unusual in the flower painting inventory. A separate, different and poetic section.
The works are painted on parchment paper. The choice of a substrate of paper with transparency and a presence that almost disappears, allows a sunflower to glow, but also poses a problem: how will the color of the oil be ‘perceived’? What happens to paper when it meets a less thick and more liquid material? Will it shrink? Will it respond to the page?
On each piece of paper – a unique painting of a sunflower. Each painted inflorescence is a personal head / portrait of a sunflower, different from the one next to it. The painting technique (also utilizing the fingers) exaggerates the personal: Ofri touches, creates the sunflower out of her hands, in a natural, almost intimate acquaintance. The flowers look like wounds, burns on paper. Each flower is a unique portrait of a flower – painted poetry and a great mental turmoil.
Tamar Shalit - Avni
Perpetuum Mobile | Video – Movie Night
Video, 4:52 minutes, 2020
Two young men, off-duty soldiers or perhaps teenagers, are climbing the big dune. The duo ‘conquers’ the dune again and again in different manners, and the climb transforms from realistic to absurd. Perpetuum Mobile, the eternal movement of the Israeli myth sends the climbers on a Sisyphean quest.
The film is part of a future trilogy following ‘Spring Worship’ (screened at the gallery in May 2019)
The ‘Movie Night’ project allows passers-by to watch a short video work even when the gallery is closed.
In this way there is a certain ‘leak’ between the inside and the outside.
Curator of the ‘Movie Night’ project – Doron Fishbein
