Magic Lantern, Israel Museum: Recent Acquisitions in Contemporary Art

Magic Lantern: Recent Acquisitions in Contemporary Art 

Israel Museum, Jerusalem 

Throught April 30, 2012

Israel Museum, Jerusalem, presents a selection of 18 recent acquisitions and gifts of international and Israeli contemporary art. Magic Lantern: Recent Acquisitions in Contemporary Art brings together works in a range of mediums by an international cadre of artists, including Vahram Aghasyan, Ilit Azoulay, Luis Camnitzer, Isaac Julien, Jonathan Monk, Adrian Paci, Anila Rubiku, Yehudit Sasportas, Hiraki Sawa, Jan Tichy, and Maya Zak, among others, all of which explore the theme of enchantment. 

Whether in landscapes or interior scenes, the works in Magic Lantern invoke the world of legend, daydream, fantasy and illusion. Through imaginary journeys, blurred silhouettes in the mist, flickering flames and dark forest shadows, the real world assumes the diffuse contours of something magical. The exhibition features works in a range of mediums, including installation, photography, video and film.

Highlights include:

- VAHRAM AGHASYAN: photographic series Ghost City (2005-2007), showing the actual state of a utopian urban development—a housing project planned in Armenia by the Soviet regime but left unfinished when the USSR collapsed, and now overtaken by seemingly apocalyptic floodwaters. In his photography, Aghasyan investigates sites and structures that originated during the Soviet era but are non-functional, incomplete or irrelevant in their current socio-political environment.

- ILLIT AZOULAY: Tree for Too One, The Keys, Window (2010), a work composed of thousands of photographs of a variety of objects and people, taken from several angles and then pieced together. Shapes and sizes are reworked digitally and recast as a single image, creating a new photographic reality in which multiple layers of being, memory and association exist simultaneously in one coherent whole.

- JONATHAN MONK: Candle Film (2009), made up of eight 16 mm films of a candle filmed as it changes slowly over time. The 16 mm film and film projector require that the reels be changed on a regular basis —approximately once every hour— by a technician. 

- MAYA ZACK: Living Room (2009), which recreates the interior of an apartment in Berlin just before it was abandoned in 1938by means of computer visualization. Based on the artist's interview with Yair Noam and his description of his childhood home, the work addresses such questions as the limitations of memory, the imagination of the artist, and the impossibility of recapturing what has been lost.

Magic Lantern is curated by Suzanne Landau, Yulla and Jacques Lipchitz Chief Curator of the Fine Arts and Landeau Family Curator of Contemporary Art.

Israel Museum Web Site

Expo Design Israelien, Bruxelles, Pierre Bergé et Associés

Expo Design Israelien : Promise Design 2011 
Pierre Bergé & Associés Bruxelles 
8 - 16 & 19 - 23 septembre 2011 

Promise Design 2011. C’est sous ce titre que le design israélien s’expose enfin hors de ses frontières. La maison Pierre Bergé & Associés accueille ces talents émergents en septembre prochain. 

Après l’Italie, durant la semaine du design à Milan en avril dernier, après une halte à Paris, Passage de Retz, lors des Designer’s Day en juin, l’exposition Promise Design 2011 s’installe à Bruxelles, chez Pierre Bergé & Associés en septembre prochain, dans le cadre de Design September. 

Il aura fallu compter sur l’acharnement d’Ely Rozenberg et du Professeur Vanni Pasca, les deux commissaires de l’exposition, pour réunir 50 créateurs israéliens et leurs projets. Un panorama de talents prometteurs qui ont pour nom Yaakov Kaufman, Ami Drach, Dov Genshrow, Chanan De Lange, Shai Barkan, Ezri Tarazi, Tal Gur, Talila Abraham, Ayala Zarfati, Hadas Armon, Bakery Studio (Gil Sheffi, Ran Amitai, Gilli Kuchik), Gal Ben Arav, Mika Barr ou encore Ofir Zucker.

ELI JACOBSON

Eli Jacobson, Moon Table 

Photo Courtesy Pierre Bergé & Associés 

OMRI BARZEEV

Omri Barzeev, Zaza Chairs 

Photo Courtesy Pierre Bergé & Associés

NIMROD SAPIR

Nimrod Sapir, My WayQuick 

Photo Courtesy Pierre Bergé & Associés

BAKERY DESIGN STUDIO

Bakery Studio, Jerusalem / Gil Sheffi, Ran Amitai, Gilli Kuchik  

Photo Courtesy Pierre Bergé & Associés 

GAL BEN ARAV

Gal Ben Arav, Bamboo Bench 

Photo Courtesy Pierre Bergé & Associés

La spécificité de ce design venu du Proche-Orient tient, notamment, dans un dialogue parfois difficile entre les industries et les designers, l’artisanat dès lors n’est jamais loin, marié pourtant aux technologies de pointe. Entre design expérimental, autoproduction et production en petites séries. Avec une belle ingéniosité, quelques questionnements sociétaux et un sens certain de l’innovation. 

Il suffira de se pencher sur ce banc écologique, ces chaises profilées, cet hélicoptère urbain, ces lampes fascinantes ou ce scooter électrique pour se convaincre que le design israélien a de beaux jours devant lui. 

« Le design israélien est le secret le mieux gardé du monde » avait écrit Mel Byars, historien du design, dans The Design Encyclopedia. L’exposition Promise Design prouve avec énergie que cette phrase peut désormais se conjuguer à l’imparfait. 

Cette exposition bénéficie de l'aide de l'ambassade d'Israël en Belgique

Promise Design 
Du 8 au 16 Septembre et du 19 au 23 Septembre 2011
De 10 à 18 heures dans le cadre de Design September à Bruxelles
www.designseptember.be

Pierre Bergé & Associés Bruxelles 
www.pba-auctions.com

Night Photography of Israel by Neil Folberg

A Compelling Collection of Night Photography of Israel and the Sinai

(c) Neil Folberg / Abbeville Press, 2008

“The deserts of Israel, Egypt and Jordan seem never to have sat for a lens quite as magical as Neil Folberg’s. Since 1979, Folberg has been focusing on the arid lands of these Mideast countries, capturing not only their dramatic contours and colors but the dazzling light shows produced at night by the skies above them… Spectacular is not too effusive a word….” — Grace Glueck, The New York Times In CELESTIAL NIGHTS, photographer NEIL FOLBERG skillfully contrasts the arid landscape of Israel and the Sinai Desert against the awesome and eternal spectacle of the night sky. The earth and heavens are mingled in this collection of arresting photographs, capturing a spectacular world of nocturnal landscapes where the horizon isn’t always definitive. This, to Folberg, represents a blurred division between present and eternity, substance and spirit, and knowledge and imagination. As Folberg writes, “No one can draw that line with precision, for we exist in all of these worlds at once.” CELESTIAL NIGHTS marks a return to black-and-white photography for Neil Folberg, a technique he honed as a student and colleague of the late Ansel Adams. The volume presents a set of photographs that capture not only the skies but also their earthly foreground, creating a striking juxtaposition of the vast arid wilderness with the infinite and starry heavens. These stunning nighttime scenes feature the samehistorically and religiously resonant region of the Middle East that Folberg captured in daytime color in his first book, Abbeville’s In a Desert Land. The landscapes in CELESTIAL NIGHTS carry an aura that is both earthly and divine. Folberg’s photographs describe places where the spiritual is at once near, imprinted in the arid landscapes, and far away, in the dark, starlit recesses of space. NEIL FOLBERG is widely known for his color photographs of the landscape and architecture of the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Galleries have exhibited Folberg’s work worldwide; his photographs are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bibliothèque Nationale, and the Smithsonian Institution. Born in San Francisco and raised in the Midwest, Folberg has lived in Jerusalem with his wife and three sons since 1976.

CELESTIAL NIGHTS

Visions of an Ancient Land

Photographs and Afterword by Neil Folberg

Introduction by Timothy Ferris

Abbeville Press, New York

January 2008

$45.00 cloth - 336 pages - 39 black-and-white photographs

ISBN 978-0-7892-0954-2

Also published by Abbeville Press:

IN A DESERT LAND

Photographs of Israel, Egypt, and Jordan Text and photography by Neil Folberg

Abbeville Press, New York

204 pages - 200 full-color illustrations

$49.95 cloth

ISBN 978-0-7892-0125-6

TRAVELS WITH VAN GOGH AND THE IMPRESSIONISTS

Discovering the Connections

Text by Lin Arison

Photograhs by Neil Folberg

Abbeville Press, New York

284 pages - 40 paintings and 100 photographs, all in full color

$45.00 cloth

ISBN 978-0-7892-0932-0

Paul Goldman Photographs of the Birth of Israel

Photography Exhibition Celebrates Israel 's 60th Anniversary - “To Return to the Land…” Paul Goldman’s Photographs of the Birth of Israel at the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.

Hungarian-born photojournalist Paul Goldman fled to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1940, where he chronicled the events leading up to the foundation of the State of Israel. Goldman’s photos of life before statehood, during the War of Independence, and the ingathering of dispersed Jews are complemented by rich memories of individuals who lived through those same events. Images and words together tell stories of the birth of Israel through the lenses of photographic and human memory. From Tel Aviv streetscapes to the bombing of the King David Hotel, from street vendors to Prime Ministers; both the extraordinary and everyday document this monumental story.

While Goldman was one of only a few photojournalists working in the British Mandate of Palestine in the 1940s, he remains largely unknown, mostly because of the practice at the time of not including photo credits in newspapers. His work was beautifully composed and restrained, as Jewish Week writes, “This supreme sensitivity makes Goldman’s photographs a small miracle in today’s world of extreme closeups and telephoto lenses, and they make for interesting, almost prosaic constructions, rich with tensions between public and private.”

“We could think of no better way to honor the birth of the State of Israel than by showing the powerful images of its struggle and its triumphs,” Museum director Dr. David G. Marwell said. “The title of this exhibition is taken from the words of the Israeli national anthem, Hatikva, and captures the fervent dream of the Jewish people to have their own state.”

Highlights of the exhibition include more than 35 images culled from a collection of negatives that lived in a shoebox until they were rediscovered in recent years. The photos are on loan to the Museum from the collection of Spencer M. Partrich. The exhibition will feature such inspiring images as the one of future Israelis toiling the land of a Kibbutz in 1943; and heartbreaking images such as one of Holocaust survivors arriving at a detention camp in 1945.

Goldman, born in 1900, fled Budapest in 1940 to escape the spreading threat of Nazism. He worked as a freelance photographer for local newspapers and international news services during the 1940s and 1950s. His role as a member of the British Army, and later as a confidant to important Israeli leaders, provided him with privileged access and a frontrow view to Israel’s growing pains. Unfortunately, Goldman’s eyesight failed him in the early 1960s — he died penniless at the age of 86 in Israel. Sadly, he never was able to see Israel’s physical beauty beyond her adolescence.

Museum of Jewish Heritage

36 Battery Place, New York, NY 10280 

http://www.mjhnyc.org/

Yitzhak Golombek, Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv - “Gaya”

Yitzhak Golombek - “Gaya”

Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv

November 8 - December 13, 2003

"Exhibited is a garden surrounded by cardboard sculptures, each a still life, about the height of a three-year-old. The objects – packaging, sewing notions and ornaments – which are piled up into towers or strewn on the floor like archeological ruins, are from a home where nothing is thrown away 'in case it might come in handy some day.' The back garden sits on a balcony belonging to a family of refugees. A universe of three generations huddling together and clinging to one another while holding on to inanimate objects that harbor the touch of the father, the son, the daughter. At the same time, the exhibit aims to achieve maximal receptiveness to materials and forms, and to construct from the compressed parcels the alphabet of an independent sculptural language."

Yitzhak Golombek

DVIR GALLERY

11 Nahum st., Tel Aviv 63503

www.dvirgallery.com

Yigal Nizri at Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv - "Living Growing"

Yigal Nizri "Living Growing"

Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv

October 3 - November 9, 2002

Yigal Nizri creates a sensual pictorial installation at the heart of which stand graphic images of the biblical seven species (wheat, barley, olive, fig, date, pomegranate, and grape). The depiction, imposed directly on the walls, will employ materials used in large-scale public advertising. In addition to the illustrations (see attached images) articles of clothing and other sewn objects will be placed throughout the space.

In Israel, the iconography of the seven species ("A land of wheat, barley, olive, fig, etc.") represents the abundance/fecundity of the "holy land." Thus, the installation addresses questions of cultural belonging, origin, and "roots".

Through the seven species, Yigal Nizri calls the dominant images adopted by Israeli culture into question. While the seven species signify attachment (to the land), they also attest to Israel's symbolic detachment from its geographic and cultural surroundings. The seven species bespeak a would be utopian oasis in a 'Levantine desert wilderness,' a fruitful eroticism amidst an 'arid impotence.'

Yigal Nizri is an artist and designer living and working in New York and Tel Aviv. A graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem (1998), he participated in the "World Views" studio residency program on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center in Fall/Winter 2000-2001.

DVIR GALLERY

11 Nahum st., Tel Aviv 63503

www.dvirgallery.com

Chagall in Israel, Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Chagall in Israel

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

September 10, 2002 - January 11, 2003

The Israel Museum, Jerusalem presents over 80 paintings and works on paper by Marc Chagall, drawn from the collections of the Israel Museum, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and private Israeli collections. Chagall in Israel represents a collaboration between the Israel Museum and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, in which the Israel Museum is lending approximately 50 works by Picasso from its collection to Tel Aviv, in exchange for the loan of 25 works by Chagall to Jerusalem. The exhibition highlights the trademark images that have made Chagall such an important figure in the history of modern art worldwide, with a particular emphasis on works inspired by his Jewish heritage and connection to Israel. 

While Chagall absorbed influences from many of the major movements of the early twentieth century, his art remained distinctively his own - a fusion of images of mysticism and realism, fantasy and nature, religion and secular life. The exhibition explores the rich and broad range of subjects which Chagall treated in his work, including self-portraits; the Jew and the Torah; the Jewish village; lovers and flowers; musicians and performers; and artworks tied to Israel. The section devoted to Chagall and Israel features paintings created during his visits; works influenced by the landscape and light of Israel; studies for projects created for Jerusalem institutions; and rarely exhibited photographs and ephemera relating to Chagall and his visits to Israel - from Israeli postage stamps bearing his images to illustrated book inscriptions highlighting his relationship with Israel Museum Founder, Teddy Kollek.

James Snyder, director of the Israel Museum, remarks: "The exhibition demonstrates the strength of Israel's holdings in the work of this great 20th century master and his ties to Israel. It also highlights the collegiality between museums in Israel and the strength of the relationships between museums and private collections here. These are all valuable messages in Israel today."

Throughout his lifetime, Chagall acknowledged the importance of the State of Israel to the Jewish people, and he enjoyed friendships with Israeli artists, art historians, politicians, businessmen, and people from many walks of life. He made his first visit to Israel in 1931, prior to the founding of the State, on the occasion of a commission he received to complete a series of 100 illustrations of the Bible. His drawings, etchings, and lithographs illustrating the Bible and works he executed during his first visit to Israel, Interior of a Synagogue in Safed, 1931 and The Wailing Wall, 1931, are on view in this exhibition. After World War II, Chagall visited Israel seven more times. In 1951 he came for the openings of exhibitions of his works in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Tel Aviv and then again in 1957 following the publication of his Biblical illustrations. Chagall enjoyed close ties to the Israel Museum since its inception; Teddy Kollek gave him a personal tour of the construction of the nascent campus in 1963.

Chagall's imprint is most widely felt in Israel through the works commissioned for major institutions in Jerusalem, which are now national landmarks. In 1962, Chagall arrived in Israel for the inauguration of the twelve stained-glass windows for the synagogue of the Hebrew University's Hadassah Medical School Center in Jerusalem. He returned to Israel shortly thereafter to discuss and execute tapestries commissioned for the new Knesset building. Chagall also completed mosaics for the gallery wall and floor of the Knesset, all of which were his gift to the Jewish people and the State of Israel. Chagall made his last visit to Israel at the age of 90 in 1977, at which time he was honored by the City of Jerusalem and awarded an honorary doctorate by the Weizmann Institute. The Israel Museum honored him through a retrospective of his works held that year, which Chagall came to view with his wife Valentina.

Chagall in Israel is curated by Stephanie Rachum. 

ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM

www.imj.org.il

Double Dress: Yinka Shonibare, a Nigerian-British Artist at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Double Dress: Yinka Shonibare, a Nigerian-British Artist

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

May 31 - October 29, 2002 

The first mid-career retrospective of Nigerian-British artist Yinka Shonibare premieres at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Organized by the Israel Museum, Double Dress: Yinka Shonibare, a Nigerian/British Artist features over 20 works, including large-scale installations, paintings and photographs. By interweaving African and traditional English motifs and imagery, Shonibare addresses critical issues of inter-culturalism with both sensitivity and humor. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the Israel Museum.

Drawing upon his own life experiences, Yinka Shonibare creates works that examine notions of identity and affiliation while challenging aesthetic and social structures and conventions. Born in London in 1962, Yinka Shonibare moved to Lagos, Nigeria with his family when he was a young boy. At seventeen he returned to England where he studied art at Goldsmiths College. His works are filled with both cultural collisions and confluences and often combine elements of "high" and "low" art.

A number of Yinka Shonibare's life-size installations recreate scenes from classical European paintings using mannequins dressed in Victorian costumes made of fabrics with African motifs. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without Their Heads (1998), for example, was inspired by Thomas Gainsborough's famous portrait of the British gentry, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (1748-49), and explores the relationship between British aristocracy and colonialism, suggesting that the wealth of the upper classes was often a result of the colonization of Africa.

One of the artist's central themes is the "dandy," and Yinka Shonibare often portrays himself as this aristocratic, witty, and decadent character. In many of his photographs, Shonibare also places himself in carefully staged scenes featuring iconic images of English high society. In his twelve-part photographic work Dorian Gray (2001), Yinka Shonibare assumes the role the namesake of Oscar Wilde's novel, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, inspired by scenes from the 1945 film version of the novel.

"Shonibare's exploration of identity and affiliation in diverse societies could not be more timely," stated James Snyder, director of the Israel Museum. "The issues he addresses are affecting the social fabric of nations throughout the world, but are especially relevant to Jerusalem, whose history has been shaped by the confluence of so many cultures. The Israel Museum is a perfect venue for presenting the work of this important artist."

Yinka Shonibare's work is in numerous private and public collections, including the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome; The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; The Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

"Shonibare's work is extremely powerful, intelligent and witty," noted Suzanne Landau, curator of the exhibition and Chief Curator of the Arts at the Israel Museum. "He captures the essence of our time by juxtaposing and combining disparate cultures and traditions, which makes his work so significant and meaningful today."

Yinka Shonibare was born in London in 1962. He grew up in Nigeria, his family's country of origin, and returned to England at the age of seventeen. This bicultural artist has created a significant body of critically acclaimed paintings, photographs, and installations that address issues of identity, class, and race. Using wit and humor, he uncovers the many layers of contemporary culture and its historical baggage.

In the early 1990s Yinka Shonibare began using faux-African cotton prints, fabrics that had become an expression of African identity, but were in fact products of colonial commerce and industry that originated elsewhere. At first he stretched the fabric across square frames, arranging them in a grid on the gallery wall; later he began to play with the fabrics in elaborate, nineteenth-century Victorian dresses and corsets. By the late 1990s his subject matter had expanded to include aliens and astronauts, along with spoofs of classic European high culture from Hogarth and Fragonard to Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde. New themes, such as the nuclear family, were introduced, and familiar themes were explored in new contexts, for example, the colonial aspects of space travel.

As his work evolved, Yinka Shonibare also began experimenting with a wider variety of media, including photography and digital imaging. This increased range of methods has allowed the artist to make pointed critiques across a spectrum of political, social, and cultural concerns, and it has given him the opportunity to situate the "African" prints in novel contexts, keeping the ironic incongruities fresh and sophisticated.

Although often linked to colonialism and identity, Yinka Shonibare's works are not defined by this connection. "I hate conclusive things," he insists. "I think once a piece is conclusive, it's dead. The mind should be allowed to travel and have fantasy and imagination. People's minds need to wander."

The exhibition is on view in the Nathan Cummings 20th Century Art Building. 

A catalogue accompanies this exhibition.

ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM

www.imj.org.il

Moshe Kupferman: Works from 1962-2000 - Retrospective Exhibition at Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Moshe Kupferman: Works from 1962-2000

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Opening January 8, 2001

"Moshe Kupferman: Works from 1962-2000", the largest exhibition ever to be held of work by Israel Prize laureate Moshe Kupferman, launches a year celebrating Israeli Art at the Israel Museum. This exhibition, featuring over 150 paintings and works on paper from the 1960's to the present, opens a year of exhibitions recognizing the achievements of veteran Israeli artists Michael Gross, Raffi Lavie, and Mordecai Ardon.

Drawn from public and private collections in Israel, Europe, and the US, the exhibition traces Kupferman's artistic development from the time of the birth of the State of Israel until today. Born in Poland in 1926, Moshe Kupferman spent World War II in the Ural and Kazakhstan internment camps. The only member of his family to survive, he emigrated to Israel in 1948 and helped establish Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot (Ghetto Fighters' Kibbutz), where he continues to live and work today.

Largely self-taught, Moshe Kupferman began to paint at the kibbutz while working on its construction. His experience as a Holocaust survivor and his enduring association with the kibbutz both inform and shape his work, which is characterized by a contradiction between unbridled emotion and silent restraint. He creates powerful abstract images through painting and then wiping layers, thus creating dialectic between expressive drama and controlled introspection.

Moshe Kupferman held his first museum exhibition at the Israel Museum in 1969, which was followed by another in 1984. Major exhibitions of Kupferman's work have also been held at the Stedljik Musuem, Amsterdam (1984); the National Museum of Modern Art, Paris (1984); The North Carolina Museum of Art (1991); The Tel Aviv Museum (1998); The Jewish Museum of History and Art in Paris (1984); and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh (1999-2000). His work appears in the public collections of the Guggenheim Museum, NY; the British Museum, London; the Musée national d'art, Paris; among others.

The exhibition displays Moshe Kupferman's body of works as an "open creation", deviating from the commonly accepted framework of a retrospective by breaking up the chronology of Kupferman's works so that they can be presented in groups according to their relationships--how they complement, complete, and contradict one another. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated, 300-page catalogue including over 100 color reproductions and new interpretations of Kupferman's work.

James Snyder, director of the Israel Museum, states: "The Israel Museum is proud to begin 2002 with this retrospective exhibition of the work of Moshe Kupferman, inaugurating a year in which we celebrate significant achievements of Israeli Art through the works of several of the most important Israeli artists of our time. Especially in these times, it is vital to recognize Israel's continuing artistic and creative strength."

ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM

www.imj.org.il

Dada and Surrealist Art from Arturo Schwarz Collection at Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Dreaming with Open Eyes
Israel Museum, Jerusalem
December 22, 2000 - June 2001

On december 2000, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem presented its first comprehensive exhibition of the Vera, Silvia and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art.

Dreaming with Open Eyes includes over 300 works by leading artists including Duchamp, Man Ray, Ernst, Breton, and Goya. Donated in 1998, this unique collection of over 750 works of art by some 200 artists were on view at the Israel Museum from December 22, 2000 through June 2001.

The gift of the Arturo Schwarz Collection, together with a library of over one thousand related books, pamphlets and artifacts donated in 1991, has transformed the Israel Museum into the largest repository in the world of Dada and Surrealist art and a global center for the study and display of these movements. "Dreaming with Open Eyes" takes advantage of Schwarz's scholarly insight to reveal the importance of the works on view, and incorporates his personal approach to the material in the exhibition. Paintings, drawings, sculptures, ready-mades, photographs and prints are complemented by unique items from the Museum's Dada and Surrealist library of art periodicals, documents, letters, and artists' books.

The presentation in Jerusalem will be followed by a major international tour. The exhibition will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts, February - April 2002; the Art Gallery of Ontario, June - September 2002; and a third North American venue; and the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, and conclude with two venues in Japan. James Snyder, Director of the Israel Museum states: "Our Museum has a long history of important holdings in Modern Art and particularly in the fields of Surrealism and Dada. The Arturo Schwarz gift in 1998, on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the State of Israel, consolidates our position as a world center for these two movements, so central to the aesthetic and intellectual progress of the 20th century. We are proud that, in "Dreaming with Open Eyes", we are able to expose the full riches of these holdings and then to share them on tour in North America and in Japan."

Dada
The Dada movement emerged in Europe and the United States in reaction to the horrors of World War I. This enclave of artists rebelled against artistic convention and sought to subvert the existing social and political order. Artists such as Marcel Janco, Raoul Hausmann, Max Ernst, and Francis Picabia represent this movement through works exemplify the key tenants of Dada: the accidental, the absurd, protest, and criticism.

Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray
The revolutionary work of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray had a profound influence on Dada and Surrealist artists and was central to later trends in twentieth-century art. Duchamp and Man Ray met in New York in 1915, and from that time on were active, both independently and jointly, in avant-garde circles in New York and Paris. Arturo Schwarz met the two artists in the 1950's and demonstrated his appreciation for their work by arranging exhibitions, acquiring dozens of works, and composing scholarship on them. Seventy works by Man Ray and Duchamp reflect their fertile imaginations, and their preoccupation with humor, playfulness, and eroticism.

Forerunners of Surrealism
The Arturo Schwarz collection includes a sizable body of pre-Surrealist work, which, like the Surrealist movement that would follow, demonstrates a timeless interest in dreams, the supernatural, and the irrational. This portion of the collection includes paintings, prints, and drawings from the 16th through the 20th centuries by artists such as Durer, Goya, Moreau, and Redon, along with tribal masks and artifacts from Africa, Oceania, and North America. Surrealism The works of dozens of Surrealist artists from the 1920's to the 1980's are arranged in the exhibition according to visual and thematic criteria. The ideological platform of the Surrealist movement, formulated by Andre Breton in the 1920's, called for a new way of seeing. Disappointed by modern Western culture, many artists and writers had been inspired by Dada and had adopted a nihilist or anarchic stance. But Surrealism did not simply advocate subversion, it called for a change in values. The movement sought to stimulate the imagination, to expand the limits of awareness, and to tap into a non-rational, subconscious psychological realm, like that revealed in dreams and madness. Among the artists represented are some of the members of the original circle of the Surrealist movement in the 1920's and 1930's, such as Andre Breton, Joan Miro, Yves Tanguy, Andre Masson, and Max Ernst. Women artists including Claude Cahun, Remedios Varo, Kay Sage, and Dorothea Tanning are prominently featured among the Surrealist group on display, many of which achieved central standing in the canon of 20th century art history.

The Library
The final component of the exhibition is drawn from the Museum's extensive library of Dada and Surrealist materials, including a display of portraits of Surrealist artists and writers immortalized by their photographer and painter colleagues, as well as a selection of original Dada and Surrealist literary documents. The collaboration between artists revealed through these portraits and publications demonstrates the spiritual bond that existed among members of the movement.

About Arturo Schwarz
Scholar and collector Arturo Schwarz was born in 1924 in Alexandria, Egypt to Jewish parents. In his youth he was very active in clandestine political circles and was arrested a number of times prior to his expulsion from Egypt in 1949. Settling in Milan in the early 1950's, he opened a publishing house and a bookstore that evolved into the Schwarz Gallery, which closed in 1975. The gallery held exhibitions of the best Dada and Surrealist artists and of contemporary artists from throughout the world. Simultaneously, Schwarz wrote poetry, published scholarly books including a catalogue raisonne of the works of Marcel Duchamp, gave lectures, and organized international Dada and Surrealist exhibitions. His intense involvement in the Surrealist movement and his personal acquaintance with many of its members has made him a leading authority on its history. "Dreaming with Open Eyes" is curated by Tamar Manor-Friedman and is accompanied by a comprehensive 250-page catalogue, which includes an illustrated inventory of the works in the Arturo Schwarz collection in the Israel Museum.

Cutting Edge Israeli Art at Israel Museum, Jerusalem - Artists: Irina Birger, Karen Russo, Ruti Nemet, Zoya Cherkassky

 

A DOLL’S HOUSE

IRINA BIRGER - KAREN RUSSO – RUTI NEMET – ZOYA CHERKASSKY

 

A Doll's House is the fourth exhibition in the framework of the Joint project for young art at the Israel Museum. The four women artists taking part in this exhibition: Irina Birger, Karen Russo, Ruti Nemet and Zoya Cherkassky, are showing three installations in the exhibition. On the surface, their installation works differ one from the other both in character and in creative process, yet the common element is almost immediately apparent. Each work is made up of images taken from different 'artistic' fields: painting, sculpture or photography as well as images drawn from media sources such as voices taped from the television and internet, animation and especially cinematic images.

These many sources do not only serve to concretize the interdisciplinary characteristic of contemporary culture, each one in its own way also raises and interprets images connected to the more hidden worlds of mythology, folktales, fairy stories and the research of the sub-conscience. In Karen Russo's installation, The Mute, for example, the descent into a complex, hidden world is immediate and concrete. The work opens with a staircase leading down into a mine, a dark passage that receives the viewer in a physical manner and 'initiates' him into the other aspects of the installation. Russo sees her installation space as a cave in the depths of the earth, representing hell, madness, the kingdom of darkness and irrationality. The space contains scientific data, archaeological finds and figures and objects from folktales, horror stories and movies.

Part of a Russian animated film, The Snow Queen, is at the center of Irina Birger's installation, also entitled The Snow Queen, - a nostalgic passage into the world of folk tales as seen through the cinematic experience of childhood. The scene shown here can be read as an index to the entire story, which depicts the boy Kay's exit from the world into the Ice Kingdom and the palace of the Snow Queen, who represents all that is irrational and lacking in emotion. Kay is eventually redeemed from his imprisonment and returned to the world and the realm of reality with the help of his love, Gerda. Birgir brings this tale of dark magic to life by screening her images on, and through, a screen of glass stalactites.

Through doll-like figures of themselves and their friends, Ruti Nemet and Zoya Cherkassky replicate the intimate world of their circle. In their installation entitled Study-cases, they are recreated as frozen bodies, dense and tactile, healthily "dead", without having died or been killed. Ruti and Zoya use the dolls as a game that becomes an alternative world, created by the precise copying of their existing one. The extended time taken to create the dolls and their environments sharpens their reality and dialectic existence, until there is no contradiction between the "real" and the alternative, illusory time and place. Dream markers and realms of the imagination are only hinted at within the doll's bodies. The figures' faces are slightly contorted, bordering on the edge of a grotesque countenance, which hints at the possibilities of their belonging to a species of harmful figures.

The immediacy and concreteness of these installations, on the one hand, and their complexity as stories which also hint at a secret world, on the other, gives these works by Ruti Nemet and Zoya Cherkassky, Karen Russo, and Irina Birger an allegorical touch, a dimension of a fable whose meaning has vanished.

The exhibition was curated by Sarit Shapira.

Closing: January 2001

Wassily Kandinsky: The Color of Abstraction, Exhibition at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Wassily Kandinsky: The Color of Abstraction 

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

September 1 - December 31, 1999

The threshold of a new millennium invites reflection. For the Israel Museum, this means gathering influential works by one of the century's most important artists for a retrospective survey of one of the great movements of early modern art. "Wassily Kandinsky: The Color of Abstraction," at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, offers visitors a first focused presentation in Israel of the master of abstract art, tracing the revolutionary course he charted at the start of the twentieth century art. Selected from key collections around the world - including the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, and the Lenbachhaus, Munich - this survey includes key works in Kandinsky's oeuvre, among them Composition VII, 1913, considered the most ambitious and perhaps most important work by the artist. 

The exhibition also includes an introductory installation of proto-modernist paintings, on loan and from the Museum's own collection, of artists in Kandinsky's circle, including Alexei von Jawlensky (1864-1941); Heinrich Campendonk (1889-1962); Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964); and Gabriele Monter (1877-1962), Wassily Kandinsky's longtime companion.

Born in Moscow to a prosperous, educated family, Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was drawn to the notion of abstraction and to the connection between the experiences of color and sound as a young adult. Inspired by both Monet and Wagner, Kandinsky went to study art in Munich, then one of Europe's foremost cultural centers, and achieved early prominence in the city's artistic life. In 1906-7, living in France, Kandinsky came under the influence of the Fauve painters, and began to paint in a freer style, with colors and forms which displayed an increasingly remote connection with the representation of real objects.

Early in 1910, a chance encounter with one of his own works lying on its side in his studio became the turning point for Kandinsky. Urged on by a new belief that the identification of subjects actually presented obstacles to a truly uplifting artistic experience, he began to draw freely, swiftly-executed contours and patches of color to create a network of images only vaguely connected to the real world. With this step, he had embarked on a voyage that would make him a pioneer of abstraction in modern art and one of the most important painters of all time.

As Kandinsky went on to develop a mature abstract style - as founder of the important Blue Rider group in Germany, in his homeland from World War I until after the Russian Revolution, and as a teacher at the Bauhaus School in Weimar from 1921-1933 - he never entirely banished representation from his paintings. Hints of realistic figures, Russian and other folk images, and particularly religious symbols remained, even as Kandinsky added geometric motifs and organic-biomorphic shapes to his paintings later in his career. Kandinsky also remained an outspoken proponent of the messianic belief that art could bring about spiritual transformation; seeing himself as a prophet, he strove to create an art that, rather than describing nature, would elevate people to a spiritual plane detached from reality.

Composition VII, 1913, on loan from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and rarely seen outside of Russia, is regarded as a perfect distillation of Kandinsky's artistic vision and perhaps the most artistic achievement of his career. Achieving a level of abstraction not seen in his earlier paintings, Composition VII presents suggestions of apocalyptic imagery through a tapestry of colors and forms. Preparatory studies for the painting make it possible to identify some of his hidden motifs, among them yellow trumpets, signaling the apocalyptic call.

James Snyder, Director of the Israel Museum, states, "Following our presentation of 'The Joy of Color' one year ago, in which the work of Wassily Kandinsky held a central place, we are pleased to have this opportunity to show for the first time in Israel a focused presentation of this most influential master of early 20th century painting. A survey of Kandinsky's work offers a beautiful and important lesson in the history and origins of abstract art."

"Wassily Kandinsky: The Color of Abstraction" is curated by Yigal Zalmona, Chief Curator-at-large at the Israel Museum. 

A color catalogue in Hebrew with a summarized text in English is available.

ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM

www.imj.org.il