Temporary Exhibitions

VALLEY ON THE ROAD TO KFAR YEHOSHUA PAINTINGS BY ELIE SHAMIR
VALLEY ON THE ROAD TO KFAR YEHOSHUA PAINTINGS BY ELIE SHAMIR Opening Thursday, 2 July 2009, for Museum Members and Patrons Open to the general public from 3 July Location Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Pavilion Curator Dr. Doron J. Lurie Catalogue The painter Elie Shamir was born in 1953 in the village Kfar Yehoshua, studied at Bezalel, and participated in many exhibitions in Israel and abroad. This exhibition centers on Shamir’s work dealing with his birthplace. After years spent in Jerusalem and Boston, Shamir returned to the village in 1999 and resettled there, as the third generation of the place’s founders. The issue of place is present with great force and complexity in Shamir’s work; aspects of this issue pertain, among others, to that tangled knot which is tied and unraveled throughout the generations between the Jew and the land, between the immigrant and the native-born, between the local Arab and the Hebrew pioneer and his vision, between the farmer and his field. The clumps of earth in Shamir’s paintings are placed on geological strata charged with biblical past, with primeval culture, with Zionist history, with socio-economic ideology, with artistic tradition but also with his own personal family story. Kfar Yehoshua is both a personal, specific case of an agricultural village in the valley of Jezre’el, and the story of a local ethos and starting point for fundamental questions about place. The exhibition and catalogue were made possible thanks to donations from Marina Hotel, Tel Aviv and Oranim Academic College, Tivon MEETINGS WITH THE ARTIST (HEBREW) 14.7 20:00 4.8 20:00 25.8 20:00 GALLERY TALKS (HEBREW) 9.7 11:30 20.7 11:30 29.7 11:30 6.8 11:30 10.8 11:30 26.8 11:30
MUNIO WEINRAUB, AMOS GITAI: ARCHITECTURE, FILM
MUNIO WEINRAUB AND AMOS GITAI: ARCHITECTURE AND FILM Through September 5 Location Sam and Ayala Zacks Pavilion Guest Curator Prof. Winfried Nerdinger This exhibition presents a dialogue between two generations, two media and two forms of expression, as it emerges from the works of father and son – Munio Weinraub and Amos Gitai. Weinraub (1909-1970), a Bauhaus-trained architect, emigrated from Germany to Eretz Israel in the mid-1930s and settled in Haifa. Here he implemented Bauhaus principles and became one of the pioneers of modern functional architecture. He worked for the labor movement’s local institutions and planned numerous projects, including cultural buildings, industrial plants, kibbutzim and private housing units, and participated in the planning of the Hebrew University campus in Givat Ram, Jerusalem and the Yad Vashem memorial. His son Amos Gitai (b. 1950) trained as an architect and, following the Yom Kippur War, became a major Israeli filmmaker, examining the central issues of Israel and the Middle East. Among his well-known films: “House”, “Wadi”, “Kadosh”, “Kippur”, “Kedma”, “Alila” and “Promised Land”. The exhibition was conceived and exhibited at the Architecture Museum of the Munich Technical University, and adapted for the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
YAACOV DORCHIN: IRON FOLDS AND LINE GESTURES
YAACOV DORCHIN: IRON FOLDS AND LINE GESTURES Through August 2 Location Markus B. Mizne Gallery, Gabrielle Rich Wing Curator Prof. Mordechai Omer Catalogue Fourteen years ago, the Museum exhibited a fascinating chapter from Yaacov Dorchin’s work – the series “Blocked Well”. Attempting to define the influence of those sculptures on the viewer’s gaze, I noted in the catalogue introduction that they are built of seemingly unbridgeable contraries: on the one hand, the flow of industrial material not yet processed, and on the other hand structures like the “dome”, made and measured with astonishing perfection. The molten iron which became encrusted in forms recalling stalactites and stalagmites is welded and grafted into restrained geometrical structures, similar to neoclassical models of late 18th Century utopian architecture (e.g. Etienne Louis Boulée). Time, too, appears in two unbridgeable registers: an actual-concrete moment, and, in contrast, an eternal moment where the material has sunk into itself and become part of an infinite and supratemporal whole. The perceptual response to these sculptures is also divided into two needs of the viewer: the rich materiality invites the eye to wander into these protuberances and pits, inviting an intimate contact with the material – yet this huge mass seems to cancel out the value of its details, and seeks to act upon the viewer with the might of its foreign, distant weight. This oscillation between far and near, industrial and intimate, negative and positive, accidental and predictable, is typical of Dorchin’s work. The present exhibition focuses on bi-dimensional and tri-dimensional works, and a similar experience seems valid for the entirety of Dorchin’s work – since he began as a painter in the late 1960s, until today. Catalogue courtesy of Gordon Gallery, Joseph Hackmey and anonymous donors. GALLERY TALKS (HEBREW) 19.5 20:00 4.6 20:00
THE ANDREA M. BRONFMAN PRIZE FOR CONTEMPORARY CRAFTS
THE ANDREA M. BRONFMAN PRIZE FOR CONTEMPORARY CRAFTS Opening Wednesday, 8 July 2009, for Museum Members and Patrons Open to the general public from 9 July Location Jeannette Assia Gallery, Charles and Evelyn Kramer Galleries Curator Meira Yagid-Haimovici Catalogue Almost hidden from the public eye, the potter Irit Abba (born 1953) has been creating for three decades. A graduate of the Bezalel Department of Ceramic Design, she has been teaching there since the mid-1980s. Her work has internalized a wide-reaching pottery culture – from the ancient pottery of China and Persia to the modern esthetic discourse formed in Britain and the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. Since 2001 Abba has been perfecting porcelain work on the pottery wheel with virtuosity, testing the boundaries of matter. During the past decade, in the movement between the raw and the refined, Abba has begun realizing a fantasy of contravening prohibitions, breaching the canonical Do and Do Not Do standards of pottery. The exhibition lays out two bodies of work, seemingly distant, that embody a transformative process undergone by Abba in the past decade, from a classical potter to a one seeking her way through porcelain. Abba has participated in many solo and group exhibitions since the 1980s in galleries and museums in Israel and abroad.
THE FRAGMENTED MIRROR EXHIBITION OF JEWISH ARTISTS, BERLIN 1907
THE FRAGMENTED MIRROR EXHIBITION OF JEWISH ARTISTS, BERLIN 1907 Opening Tuesday, 16 June 2009, for Museum Members and Patrons Open to the general public from 17 June Location Simon and Marie Jaglom Pavilion Curator Dr. Batsheva Goldman Ida Catalogue In 1907, an Exhibition of Jewish Artists opened in Berlin. Reflecting the Berlin Jewish community which sponsored it, it was replete with contradictions and paradoxes: Jewish, but not religious; nationalist, but not Zionist; assimilated and German, but also with works by East European Jews. Artists included Lesser Ury, Josef Israëls, Pissarro, Maurycy Gottlieb, Samuel Hirszenberg and many more. Twelve of the 200 works - paintings and sculptures - as well as works of over half of the artists presented at the Berlin exhibition, are in the collection of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and constitute this exhibition’s focus, with loans from private and public collections. Major funding was provided by The David Berg Foundation, New York GALLERY TALKS (HEBREW) 25.6 20:00 30.6 20:00
RAPPAPORT PRIZE FOR A YOUNG ISRAELI ARTIST, 2008
RAPPAPORT PRIZE FOR A YOUNG ISRAELI ARTIST, 2008 2008 JOSSEF KRISPEL: GHOSTS Through 25 july, 2009 Location Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Sculpture Gallery Curator Prof. Mordechai Omer Catalogue Jossef Krispel’s (b. 1974 in the communal village Vardon, lives in Tel Aviv) paintings sway between yearnings for a perfect, constant, structured existence reminiscent of the 18th Century world, and a deconstructed, detached, devastated world built on the shaky foundations of Post-Modernism. The craving for perfection on the one hand, and the awareness of existential defeatism on the other hand, together stitch “puzzles” attesting to an insatiable hunger for a hidden image, as well as to fragments of images that have lost relevance to the whole from which they have been plucked, and to which they can no longer return. The common denominator of all these detached images that have been excised from some contemporary limitless encyclopedia whichsought to touch upon every possible entry, yet equally split, isolated and mutilated each of its entries – is the very painting, the very act of painting. This act of painting seems to bring back to life images on the verge of disappearance, in danger of extinction, and their vitality is the indicator of human passion with all its desires and nightmares, from which humanity has been seeking to wake from the beginning of time. GALLERY TALKS (HEBREW) 12.5, 20.00 18.6, 20.00
CELEBRITY PORTRAITS FROM THE ANDY WARHOL FACTORY
CELEBRITY PORTRAITS FROM THE ANDY WARHOL FACTORY THE MARTIN SANDERS COLLECTION Opening Tuesday, 14 July 2009, for Museum Members and Patrons Open to the general public from 15 July Location Haft Hall, upper level Curator in Charge Nili Goren Andy Warhol’s Factory (New York, 1963-1983) was one of the most famous centers of creativity in the history of contemporary art. The exhibition presents portraits of Warhol and some of his associates, taken at the Factory by Billy Name, Gerard Malanga, Carl Fischer and Curtis Knapp. Warhol operated a machine for creating and elevating superstars, and transformed the way we view celebrity portraits through his paintings, his films, his magazine Interview, and the promotion of the numerous creative people in his circle. All the images Warhol produced – photograph-based silkscreens, film “screen tests”, feature-length films and still photographs – were motivated by two main goals: the urge to capture and elevate personality, fame and celebrity, and the urge to create a momentary defense against time, the transience of life and death. The photographs of Warhol taken by Carl Fischer in 1969, after Warhol was wounded in an assassination attempt, reveal the physical scars left by the wounding as well as the vulnerability of his celebrity image.
AMNON DAVID AR WINNER OF THE 2008 HAIM SHIFF PRIZE
AMNON DAVID AR WINNER OF THE 2008 HAIM SHIFF PRIZE FOR REALISTIC PAINTING IN THE TRADITION OF PHOTOREALISM AND HYPERREALISM Through 4 JULY Location Haft Hall, upper level Curator Dr. Doron J. Lurie Catalogue Amnon David Ar, an artist of splashes of light as well as of stark realism, was born in 1973 in Herzliya. He has been living and working for many years in south Tel Aviv, in a picturesque studio crowded with bizarre objects, reminiscent of 17th Century Cabinets of Curiosities. Ar considers himself mostly self-taught, although in his youth he studied painting and drawing with artists Oswald Adler and Abraham Bykov. He also attended one year at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, which he left in a fit of fury. Since then, he has worked as a painter and illustrator (Ma’ariv, Davar, etc.) and has had three solo exhibitions: at the Museum of Israeli Art, Ramat Gan (2004); at the Bernard Gallery, Tel Aviv (2005); and at the Vieleers Gallery, Amsterdam (2007). He has also participated in group exhibitions at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (“4000 Years of Portraits”, 2002); the Janco Dada Museum (“Observation Time”, 2000); the Bat Yam Museum of Art (1998); and in two exhibitions at the Forum Gallery in New York.
PERPETUAL MOVEMENT WITH ALEXANDER CALDER
PERPETUAL MOVEMENT WITH ALEXANDER CALDER FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY (ACTIVITIES FOLLOWING CALDER) Opening Thursday, 23 July 2009, for Museum Members and Patrons Open to the general public from 24 July 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
MIND THE CRACKS! COLLAGES FROM THE MUSEUM
MIND THE CRACKS! COLLAGES FROM THE MUSEUM AND FROM OTHER COLLECTIONS MIND THE CRACKS! Opening Thursday, 20 August 2009, for Museum Members and Patrons Open to the general public from 21 August Location Markus B. Mizne Gallery, Gabrielle Rich Wing Curator Irith Hadar Catalogue The term collage is routinely used to describe artistic technique and practice. However, the starting point of the present exhibition does not lean upon the term’s limited functional meaning, but rather on collage as an utterance: the fundamental, characteristic even, utterance of the 20th century, which is charged with renewed vitality in the 21st century. The exhibition offers a selection of collages ranging from 1916 to 2009, mostly from the Museum collection. The exhibition is organized by thematic categories rather than chronological sequence, and raises questions: What is it that makes collage so different, so enthralling? What makes it appear so suitable of our time? Which of its qualities enables its perception as the characteristic utterance of modernist avant-garde as well as its relevance to artists today?
TEN FINGERS PAINTING PICASSO… AN ARTIST ALSO FOR THE YOUNG
TEN FINGERS PAINTING PICASSO… AN ARTIST ALSO FOR THE YOUNG Through 28.2 workshop for 3-6 year-olds and parents. Picasso – an artist that loved to draw, paint, sculpt and invent. The workshop is open during museum hours.
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, Sčvres 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.