Temporary Exhibitions

MARC CHAGALL, SELECTED ETCHINGS FROM THE SERIES “DEAD SOULS”, ILLUSTRATING NIKOLAI GOGOL’S EPIC POEM, 1923-1927
CABINET SECRETS: PRINTS FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF PRINTS AND DRAWINGS Location Foyer near Graphics Study Room MARC CHAGALL, SELECTED ETCHINGS FROM THE SERIES “DEAD SOULS”, ILLUSTRATING NIKOLAI GOGOL’S EPIC POEM, 1923-1927 Curator Alisa Padovano-Friedman Through 17 April, 2010 Grotesque, exaggerated figures that are more than slightly critical of 19th century Russian society, with its characteristic corruption and bureaucracy.
THE SCULPTURE OF EDGAR DEGAS
THE SCULPTURE OF EDGAR DEGAS Opening Thursday, 25 March 2010, for Museum Members and Patrons Open to the general public from 26 March Location Simon and Marie Jaglom Pavilion Curator Prof. Mordechai Omer Catalogue The exhibition presents, for the first time in Israel, Edgar Degas’ (1834–1917) 74 sculptures in bronze. The bronzes were cast from previously unknown lifetime plasters made directly from Degas’ original waxes, with the artist’s knowledge and consent. The plaster of Degas’ most important sculpture, “The Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen,” was discovered in 2001, leading to the 2004 discovery of the other 73 plasters. Degas worked in various artistic media: oils and pastels, etchings and photography, painting on monotype plates and sculptures in wax, as well as writing poetry. He exhibited only one sculpture in his lifetime: “The Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen” – a realistic wax sculpture which he dressed in real clothes. This unusual work was presented at the 1881 sixth Impressionist exhibition in Paris, arousing much curiosity and criticism. It is well documented that every Degas bronze was cast after the artist’s death. His sculptures focus on five main themes, presented here as five chapters: dancers in motion, dancers behind the scenes, bathers, portraits and horses.
ARAM GERSHUNI: RECENT PAINTINGS
ARAM GERSHUNI: RECENT PAINTINGS Through March 13, 2010 Location Jeannette Assia Gallery Curator Prof. Mordechai Omer Catalogue Loyalty to the visual experience and the impulse to prevent it from slipping away are the moving force of Aram Gershuni’s artistic work. Keeping close to the motif that serves as his means – portrait, landscape, still life or any other image he happens upon – Gershuni holds on to the primal, fragile and almost-disappearing experience in order to try and restore its existence as a painting. “Painting”, he said in an interview with Dror Burstein, “is a lost gaze which I try to reclaim”. Although Aram Gershuni regards the painting’s impersonal as an indispensable value, he dares to enter, especially in portraits, into powerful, emotionally charged fields that penetrate the most intimate autobiography of the family cell: his father, mother, wife, children. In the portraits, and most surprisingly in his dealings with landscapes or still life, the motifs themselves minimize their presence, and in return a rich, experience-laden world unfolds before the viewers, a world detached from the model and focused on the painting’s plastic values. Aram Gershuni’s painterly values are well-anchored in the medium’s rich and long-standing traditions, with an almost physical link to works of masters such as Antonello da Massina and Ingres, or more contemporary artists such as the American Lennart Anderson (Israel Hershberg’s teacher) or the English Euan Uglow. Aram Gershuni is a graduate of the Jerusalem Studio School founded by Israel Hershberg, and today teachers at the Tahana School of Drawing and Painting in Tel Aviv, which he founded in 2005. GALLERRY TALK 12.1, 20.00
ZADOK BEN DAVID: HUMAN NATURE
ZADOK BEN DAVID: HUMAN NATURE Through february 27, 2010 Location Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Pavilion; Markus B. Mizne Gallery, Gabrielle Rich Wing Curator Irith Hadar Catalogue The exhibition, extending over two halls, presents single sculptures and a sculpture installation – a selection of recent works by sculptor Zadok Ben David (born and immigrated to Israel in 1949, lives in London). The sculptures are steel cutouts of figures whose bodies are an image of boughs and foliage, or of trees whose foliage is a silhouette of human activity; sculptures that are isolated, enclosed, anonymous presences, each standing alone in space. The installation is a wide field of sand planted with 20,000 cutouts of defined, specified flowers, and its appearance transforms and astounds throughout the viewing. Crossbreeding images of nature with descriptions of the human body, and relying on the angle of vision, are both the common denominator and the code of this cohesive group of works which is a further chapter – or an intermediate summary – of the sequence of Ben David’s work in creating ironic parallels to our various modes of perception. Exhibition and catalogue sponsored by Isracard; Michael and Felicia Crystal; Wendy Fisher; Sara Lahat; Doron and Marian Livnat; and Michael and Phyllis Rapp Zadok Ben David, Here I Am, 2006 GALLERY TALKS (HEBREW) 22.12 20:00 19.1, 20.00 16.2, 20.00 ENCOUNTER WITH THE ARTIST 25.2 20.00
KOOLHAAS: HOUSELIFE
KOOLHAAS: HOUSELIFE, 2008 58 min. (French with Hebrew subtitles) Directors: Ila Bêka, Louise Lemoîne Location Haft Hall, upper level Curator Meira Yagid Haimovici Through 6 March The film “Koolhaas: HouseLife” presents daily life in the villa on the outskirts of Bordeaux, designed by architect Rem Koolhaas during 1994-1998. The film follows the stories and activities of the house’s caretaker Guadalupe Acedo and the maintenance staff, and the viewer is exposed to a conflictual range of situations. The staff witnesses the occurrences, and becomes, in the words of Jean-François Chevrier, “the specters of the everyday”. Unlike most architecture films that document icons of architecture history in singulative compositions as a fetishist image, this film presents the relationship between architectural elements and domestic functions. “Inhabiting means leaving traces”, Walter Benjamin wrote, and the film indeed lets the viewer enter the house, the normally invisible bubble of intimacy, and view the traces. Rem Koolhaas (born 1944) is the most prominent architect and theoretician of our times. His questions about the essence of the profession and the architectural object, about constructing and presenting programs, situate the process of design as an intellectual process and a social practice. In 1975 he established the architect partnership OMA in Rotterdam, which developed into a corporation with four offices worldwide (Rotterdam, New York, Beijing and Hong Kong) as well as the research branch, AMO.
NATHAN GOTTESDIENER FOUNDATION
NATHAN GOTTESDIENER FOUNDATION THE ISRAELI ART PRIZE 2009 SHORTLISTED ARTISTS NIRA PEREG: MOUNTAIN The video work “Sabbath”, 2008, and the new video work “Reserved in Life”, 2009 (three channels), at the center of Nira Pereg’s (b. 1969) exhibition, use documentary materials filmed in Jerusalem: in the former – blocking the streets in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods to vehicles, using various blockades, as the Sabbath enters; in the latter – distribution of land and workforce in the crowded “real-estate” site of the Mount of Rest cemetery. The expression “reserved in life” refers to burial plots that living people purchase for themselves. Both works deal with social rituals and with marking territories and boundaries in Jerusalem: between the sacred and the profane, between the living and the dead. The intensive soundtrack amplifies the ritual, repetitive effect of dragging the blockades and of digging in the stony earth – activities that determine the rhythm of the films. EREZ ISRAELI: CURING The exhibition “Friday Night”, presented at Givon Gallery in April 2009, marked a turning point in the work of Erez Israeli (b. 1974): his dealing with death and bereavement turned from the Israeli military context to dealing with Germany, Europe and the Holocaust. The starting point for the current exhibition was a relatively marginal detail in that installation: a torso-like concrete casting in the shape of a Torah cover. The title of the current exhibition, “Curing”, is a term taken from the pre-retail stage of processing and curing fabrics, and is also used in other production areas, mostly in processing concrete. Indeed, the sizeable sculptural installation at the center of the new exhibition links structural architectural motifs with textile and text (Torah book), and is executed in various ways of processing concrete – a material Israeli has been using frequently since his early work. NAAMA TSABAR: SWEAT Naama Tsabar’s (b. 1982) exhibition space is inhabited by three components: two “sound walls” whose “building blocks” are home loudspeakers – walls that become, through the strings stretched along them, independent musical instruments; shelves with alcoholic drink bottles whose mouths are stuffed with coiled sheets that absorb their liquids by osmosis; and the video work “Untitled/Babies”, 2009, in which a female rock band performs with the artist as the soloist, a show that ends with the guitar being smashed against the stage floor, the stage falling apart (while the guitar remains unbroken), and an exhausted artist. The reversal of aggressive male rituals from the world of rock music and “Molotov cocktails” exuding intoxicating scents and arousing physical associations make “Sweat” an environment that transmits pleasure and violence whose end is a gradual decomposition/disintegration. Jury: Prof. Mordechai Omer, David Neuman, Daniella Luxemburg, Ellen Ginton, Nathan Gottesdiener. Finals Judge: Catherine Grenier, National Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, Paris. The winner will be announced on Tuesday, 13 April 2010
FAMILY/TREE II NEW ACQUISITIONS DONATED BY THE RIVKA SAKER AND UZI ZUCKER FUND FOR ISRAELI CONTEMPORARY ART
HELENA RUBINSTEIN PAVILION FOR CONTEMPORARY ART NEW EXHIBITION FAMILY/TREE II NEW ACQUISITIONS DONATED BY THE RIVKA SAKER AND UZI ZUCKER FUND FOR ISRAELI CONTEMPORARY ART Opening Thursday, 7 January 2010, for Museum Members and Patrons Open to the general public from 8 January Curator Ellen Ginton Catalogue Thirteen artists, six women and seven men, participate in Part II of the exhibition Family/Tree, with paintings, sculptures and installations. The age gap between them is over forty years, and in this sense they represent several generations and different artistic approaches in Israeli art. However, the works are all from a limited period – the past decade, from 2000 onwards, except for one work dated 1996. As expected, there is similarity in the works, derived from the historical and artistic periods alike: a note of pessimism and elegy. Not only do some of the works carry clear images of death, end, decline and violence, but expressions of death, calamity and terrorism also recur in the texts written about them – independently, by various writers. Nurit David’s work is a replica of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “The Triumph of Death” (1562), which inadvertently seems to represent the whole collection. Artists in the exhibition: Moshe Gershuni, Raffi Lavie, Yudith Levin, Gabriel Klasmer, Nurit David, Yitzhak Livneh, Diti Almog, Gil Shachar, Eliezer Sonnenschein, Sigalit Landau, Daniel Silver, Angela Klein, Jan Tichy, Netally Schlosser. GALLERY TALKS FAMILY/TREE II (HEBREW) 19.1 20:00 11.2 20:00
TAMAR GETTER: GO 2
TAMAR GETTER: GO 2 Opening Tuesday, 23 March 2010, for Museum Members and Patrons Open to the general public from 24 March Location Sam and Ayala Zacks Pavilion, Meshulam Riklis Hall Guest Curator Naomi Aviv Catalogue Tamar Getter’s comprehensive exhibition, “GO 2”, emphasizes her work’s combined, multi-voiced, exaggerated and grotesque utterance. It includes some 10 new painting units, sprawling over more than 100 meters, alongside canonical works, from the cycles “Tel Hai”, “Landscapes”, “Artificialia Naturalia”, “History Lessons” and “Recruits”. The exhibition seeks to refresh the gaze and accentuate the observation of this body of work that is thin and charged, skeletal and rich, continuous, critical and central. Getter is one of the prominent artists of the Israeli avant-garde that developed and peaked in the 1970s. In addition to being a student of Raffi Lavie, whose influence is evident mostly in her composition, Getter’s studies at the Tel Aviv University Department of Poetics and Comparative Literature during the 1970s have probably been even more constitutive and significant. Getter’s work expands the understanding of the modernist project and refers to the artistic object as one of constant research. Tamar Getter, during work on Corpses and Chalices, 2010 GALLERY TALKS (HEBREW) 1.4 20:00 27.4 20:00
PERPETUAL MOVEMENT WITH ALEXANDER CALDER
PERPETUAL MOVEMENT WITH ALEXANDER CALDER FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY (ACTIVITIES FOLLOWING CALDER) Location Haft Hall, lower level Curator Sara Raiman Shor Exhibition and activities based on the works of American artist Alexander Calder (1898-1976). Humor, playfulness and movement are expressed in the works, which verge between painting and sculpture, between line and mass, between bi- and tri-dimensionality, between the figurative and the abstract. The mobiles moving in the wind, the stabiles that create an illusion of movement, and the circus games Calder made, all become an inspiration for activities: building mobiles and stabiles, making figures with lines and filament, activating the body in imitation of the sculptures’ balance, games according to the artist’s circus figures. For children this is a fascinating activity; for the parents – quality time with their children. See also “Morning Adventure” in the Children Section. The exhibition was made possible courtesy of the British Friends of the Art Museums of Israel and the American Friends of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art
TAL MAZLIAH
THE 2009 RAPAPPORT PRIZE FOR AN ESTABLISHED ISRAELI PAINTER TAL MAZLIAH Opening Thursday, 18 March 2010, for Museum Members and Patrons Open to the general public from 19 March Location Markus B. Mizne Gallery, Gabrielle Rich Wing Guest Curator Efrat Livny Catalogue Tal Mazliah’s paintings are constructed like a riddle which the viewer must decipher. Beyond the colorful, tempting, almost blinding cover, there hides a plethora of images, of figures and of symbols, imbued with sentences and words that consolidate into a full, complex pictorial and emotional world. A deep, prolonged observation exposes an intricate layering and reveals yet more details, which eventually become a flickering puzzle, demanding repeated scrutiny from the viewer. A constant tension exists in the paintings between revealing and concealing, between the part and the whole, between the naïve and the self-conscious, between a series of intertwined contexts. The exhibition presents for the first time paintings from the past five years, as well as a selection of paintings from previous years.
MATTERS OF THE HEART: FROM THE AZRIELI COLLECTION
MATTERS OF THE HEART: FROM THE AZRIELI COLLECTION Opening Monday, 21 December 2009, for Museum Members and Patrons Open to the general public from 22 December Location Simon and Marie Jaglom Pavilion Curator Ziva Koort Catalogue The collection includes figurative works by 20th century Israeli artists as well as works by late 19th century Jewish artists. Israeli modernism as well as Diaspora Jews, local landscapes as well as synagogues. Among the artists: Avigdor Arikha, Eldar Farber, Aharon Halevi, Michael Kovner, Meir Pichadze, Mordecai Ardon, Nahum Gutman, Moshe Castel, Ofer Lellouche, Reuven Rubin, Mauricio Minkowski, Abel Pann, Yohanan Simon, Yosl Bergner. The works in the collection touch upon David Azrieli the collector – his existence as a Zionist; his past as a refugee; family man, lover of music, literature and nature. Sponsored by the Azrieli Group GALLERY TALK (HEBREW) 28.1, 20.00 18.2, 20.00 23.2, 20.00
THE 2009 RAPAPPORT PRIZE FOR A YOUNG ISRAELI PAINTER
THE 2009 RAPAPPORT PRIZE FOR A YOUNG ISRAELI PAINTER MELANIE DANIEL: EVERGREEN Opening Thursday, 18 March 2010, for Museum Members and Patrons Open to the general public from 19 March Location Haft Hall, upper level Guest Curator Sagi Refael Catalogue “Evergreen”, Melanie Daniel’s (b. 1972) new series of paintings, brings to a peak the artist’s work with images of camouflage and human blending into the environment, which combine feelings of foreignness and alienation with those of belonging. Daniel arrived at art after immigrating from Canada to Israel in 1995. Since then, she has participated in many group exhibitions in Israel and overseas, and held solo exhibitions in Sweden, New Zealand, Canada and Israel.
MARCEL DUCHAMP: “ORIGINAL”
CABINET SECRETS: PRINTS FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF PRINTS AND DRAWINGS Location Foyer near Graphics Study Room, Garden level MARCEL DUCHAMP: “ORIGINAL” PRINTS AND REPRODUCTIONS Curator Irith Hadar From 19 April Marcel Duchamp’s (1887–1968) prints integrate well with the contradicting strategies essential to his artistic activity in general. All the exhibited prints were donated by Charles and Evelyn Kramer, New York. Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1964 (1919), reproduction with pencil additions
LIVING ROOM ñìåï
HELENA RUBINSTEIN PAVILION FOR CONTEMPORARY ART LIVING ROOM | ñìåï David Adika, Uri Gershuni, Shai Ignatz, Rami Maymon, Rona Yefman Opening Friday, 26 March 2010, for Museum Members and Patrons Open to the general public from 27 March Guest Curator Hadas Maor Catalogue The five participating artists met during their studies in the Departments of Photography and of Fine Art at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem. They completed their BFAs in the late 1990s, and have since continued studying, teaching and exhibiting in various venues, all the while maintaining their friendly relations and professional collaboration. While their areas of activity are ostensibly tangential, they each construct unique, highly divergent thematic, mental and formal worlds. Ten years after their graduation, this exhibition seeks to explore the overall position generated and proposed by their different work processes with regard to both the history of the photographic medium and the notion of portraiture. Concurrently, it endeavors to explore the very essence of the transition from analog to digital photography and the different manners in which this transition has influenced culture in general and photography in particular. Rami Maymon, Dana (Mona Lisa), 2007 ENCOUNTER WITH THE CURATOR (HEBREW) 1.4 11:30 GALLERY TALK (HEBREW) 22.4 20:00
ROBERT BASER (1908–1998) PAINTING AND SCULPTURE
ROBERT BASER (1908–1998) PAINTING AND SCULPTURE A RETROSPECTIVE Opening Friday, 19 March 2010, for Museum Members and Patrons Open to the general public from 20 March Location Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Pavilion Guest Curator Prof. Gila Ballas Catalogue The exhibition includes paintings and sculptures created over seventy years of work. Robert Baser was one of the founders of the New Horizons (“Ophakim Hadashim”) group, and is known especially for his watercolors. Indeed, his aquarelles are noted for a rich, radiant colorfulness, and perfectly translate the uniqueness of Mediterranean light and colors. His larger, more planned works in oils and acrylics display a solid structuralism, expressing his work’s typical synthesis between the Dionysian layer – expressive and emotional, and the Apollonian – rationalistic and reserved. Until the late 1970s, Baser was considered among Israel’s best innovative sculptors. However, this facet of his work is less known, for he hardly exhibited his sculptures, although he never stopped creating them. It was actually in his sculptures that he gave his fertile imagination a free rein, in experiments and innovations and a humoristic, ironic expression of his social and political views. Robert Baser, Zoe-Agapi (Life-Love), 1957 GALLERY TALKS (HEBREW) 23.3 19:00 8.4 19:00
MEISSEN PORCELAIN
HELENA RUBINSTEIN PAVILION FOR CONTEMPORARY ART NEW EXHIBITIONS MEISSEN PORCELAIN Location The Danek and Jadzia Gertner Galleries CuratorDr. Doron J. Lurie Catalogue picture:Rape of Europe, ca. 1800, Meissen One of the synonyms for porcelain is the word china (from China, the country), which denotes the material’s historical origin. Meissen porcelain is considered one of the high-quality porcelains in the European porcelain industry (other porcelain factories are Rosenthal of Austria, Vienna Porcelain, Delft porcelain in the Netherlands, Sèvres in France, Capodimonte in Naples, and more). Following continuous attempts, chemists who worked at the service of Emperor Augustus II of Saxony succeeded in producing porcelain that was similar to the renowned Chinese porcelain. A factory was founded in Meissen, near Dresden, which employed potters, goldsmiths, painters, designers, enamel and glass artists; it flourished throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries. Meissen factories produced various figures (in the semblance of members of the nobility, peasants, animals, and so forth) in various scenes taken from everyday life, from Greek mythology, allegories, as well as functional decorative items (candelabras, tableware, clocks, etc.). Some of these were white, while others were painted in splendid colors. The exhibition features about forty items, most of them Meissen products, on loan from Danek and Jadzia Gertner, Vienna.