Michal Rovner Exhibition @ Pace Gallery, NYC - "Pragim"

Michal Rovner: Pragim 

Pace Gallery, New York

March 8 – April 18, 2024

Pace presents an exhibition of works by Michal Rovner at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. The show, titled Pragim—the Hebrew word for Poppies—features prints, video works, and installations from a series the artist started in 2019. Over the last five years, as part of this long-term project, Michal Rovner has filmed and drawn wild poppies that grow in her field in Israel.

For more than 30 years, Michal Rovner’s practice has centered on universal questions of the human condition—bringing issues of identity, place, and dislocation to the fore. The poppy—which carries different associations and meanings around the world—embodies both fragility and fortitude, as well as memorial and loss. The ongoing war has impacted the artist’s perspective on her Pragim works, as they now also powerfully reflect the state of unrest and anguish afflicting the region. Using a dark palette of black, gray, and red, the artist imbues her human-scale staccato swaying poppies with harsh and tragic qualities.

Working across drawing, printmaking, video, sculpture, and installation, the artist often obscures identifying details and specifics of time and place in her layered compositions, creating abstract yet resonant reflections of reality and the human experience. One of her most famous projects is Makom (Place), a series of monumental cubic structures composed of stones of dismantled or destroyed Israeli and Palestinian homes from Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Haifa, the Galilee, and the border between Israel and Syria. The Makom series echoes conflicts in the past and present. Working with Israeli and Palestinian masons, Michal Rovner addresses the possibility of creating together, in a shared experience of reconstructing and rebuilding.

MICHAL ROVNER (b. 1957, Tel Aviv, Israel) works with drawing, printmaking, video, sculpture, and installation to reflect on the continuum of human experience. Her work shifts constantly between the poetic and the political, using imagery that invokes the fragility of existence, identity, dislocation, and time. Generally avoiding direct representation of specific issues or events, Michal Rovner reinterprets the present and historical memory. She records and erases visual information, obscuring specifics of time and place through gestural, abstract qualities.

Important historic exhibitions and installations of her work include Michal Rovner: The Space Between, Whitney Museum of American Art (2002); Against Order? Against Disorder?, Venice Biennale (2003); Incidental Affairs, Suntory Museum, Osaka (2009); Michal Rovner: Histoires, Musée du Louvre, Paris (2011); and Michal Rovner: Transitions, Canary Wharf, London (2019). Michal Rovner’s work resides in numerous public collections worldwide including The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Paris Audiovisuel, France (Collection of the City of Paris); and The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel, among others.

PACE GALLERY

540 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Photographs of Adi Nes, FAMSF, Legion of Honor, San Francisco - Between Promise and Possibility: The Photographs of Adi Nes

Between Promise and Possibility: The Photographs of Adi Nes

FAMSF, Legion of Honor, San Francisco

13 March – 18 July 2004

Works by contemporary Israeli photographer ADI NES (b. 1965) are featured at the Legion of Honor, in an exhibition that highlights 21 of the artist’s large-scale, meticulously staged color photographs. In 2001 Adi Nes was the recipient of the Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation Prize for Israeli art, an award intended to encourage young talent and support an exhibition at a major museum.

Comprising a large portion of the Legion exhibition, is Adi Nes’s fashion photography series, which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2003 issue of Vogue Hommes International. Nes’s fashion series, exhibited for the first time in the United States, after a showing at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, places models in a faux prison setting, drawing fashion into a social, political, and ideological critique, while exploring how the fashion industry packages images of desirability.

The exhibition also features a series of Adi Nes’s photographs depicting contemporary life in Israel, particularly that of the heroic Israeli soldier. Adi Nes’s photographs often reference classical and modern mythology and art history sources, combining these traditional references with a contemporary perspective that both illuminates and questions Israeli sociopolitical realities.

"Adi Nes’s photographs resonate with exquisite beauty through a combination of documentary drama and poetic idealism," said Dr. Daniell Cornell, Associate Curator for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. "Made tangible by Nes’s personal interpretation of the heroic soldier, his cultural identity, and his identity as a gay Israeli," Daniel Cornell continued, "these photographic images are fused with an innocence and vulnerability --a theme Nes also pursues and develops in his images of adolescent boys."

In his series of photographs of adolescent boys and young men, Adi Nes situates them in carefully constructed tableaus that emphasize the codes of "masculine identity," while at the same time challenges them. Set in locations throughout his native Israel, Adi Nes’s Kiryat Gat photographs, while maintaining a strictness to detail, are charged with highly edgy, realistic situations, which exude an insight into human potential, perfection, and loss.

ABOUT ADI NES

1965 Born in Kiryat Gat

1989-92 Photography studies (BFA) at the Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem

Awards

1999 Minister of Education, Culture and Sport Prize

2000 The Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation Israeli Art Prize, Tel Aviv Museum of Art

Solo Exhibitions

2000 Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv

2001 "Recent Photographs", Tel Aviv Museum of Art

2002 Solo Exhibition, The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego

"Adi Nes: Photographs", Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, Chicago

2003 "Recent Photographs", Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

"Recent Photographs", Leon Constantiner Prize, Tel Aviv Museum of Art

FINE ARTS MUSEUMS OF SAN FRANCISCO - FAMSF

LEGION OF HONOR

34th Avenue & Clement Street, Lincoln Park, San Francisco, CA 94121

www.thinker.org

Michael Gross, Israel Museum, Jerusalem - Recent Works

Michael Gross: Recent Works

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Opening February 26, 2002

Born in Tiberias in 1920 as a sixth generation sabra, Michael Gross has emerged as one of Israel's leading painters and sculptors, his achievements culminating in his receipt of the Israel Prize for Sculpture in 2002. Gross's art expresses close identification with the geographical and biographical landscape of his childhood, responding to the hot climate and vistas of the Galilee and Jerusalem.

The exhibition includes over 25 paintings and two sculptures, drawn from the Museum's collections and from private sources, the majority of which have been created in the past ten years. A few of his earlier works will also be featured to allow for comparative study of his later works. The range of work spans from a 1949 sculpture of his mother, through to a painting completed in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks on the United States.

The tragedy of pain and loss are repeated themes in Gross's work. Over the years, he returned often to portraits of his late father, who in 1939 was stabbed to death by Arabs at his farm near the Sea of Galilee. This traumatic event left a permanent mark on Gross and provided the initial stimulus for his painting.

Michael Gross's desire to preserve and immortalize reflects both a representational and expressionist approach: the desire to capture a particular moment in reality together with a particular emotional state. The interplay of expression and representation lies at the heart of Gross's works, which are characterized by an unresolved tension between heroism and lyricism, asceticism and sensuality, loneliness and intimacy. Gross's paintings demand full concentration, as the viewer strives to decipher the enigmatic truth of a work and to understand its essence.

The exhibition, curated by Yigal Zalmona, Chief Curator-at-Large.

It is on view in the Ayala Zacks Abramov Pavilion for Israel Art, accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue.

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

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