HERZLIYA.- The main exhibition of the 2023 Winter season at the
Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art is the group exhibition On Point, curated by the artist Ben Hagari. It covers most of the Museum’s grounds, and is the result of a unique, extensive collaboration with the collection of prints on paper of the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies in the School of the Arts at Columbia University, New York. The exhibition features a fascinating selection of works by contemporary and historical international artists, including renowned ones such as Jasper Johns, William Kentridge, Kiki Smith, Sarah Sze, Kara Walker, and more.
Over the past decade, the Herzliya Museum has sought to expand the historical memory of local art, through which contemporary Israeli art is perceived. The Museum has consistently presented exhibitions of deceased artists – some well-known and some forgotten – coupled with research of their artistic legacy, in a bid to raise a renewed awareness of the uniqueness and importance of their work. This time two solo exhibitions are dedicated to important artists who were active in Israel for many years: Aviva Uri (1922–1989) and Ivan Schwebel (1932–2011).
At the same time, the Museum strives to present upcoming, promising artists. Rotem Amizur is a young artist for whom this is a first solo exhibition at a museum, curated by the artist Iddo Markus. The two have been working for the past decade as part of a collective of artists in Haifa. At its heart are large-scale, paper-based collages depicting a triumphal procession inspired by a reproduction from an old book – a fragment from a large mural by Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna.
Interlinking all the exhibitions is a web of medial and conceptual internal contexts. Collectively, the exhibitions tell the story of paper as a creative platform, and of the drawn line that retains the movement of the drawing action. That line, coming alive in the exhibitions as an expression of dynamism, makes its voice heard through a dialogue with related creative fields: illustration, animation, and cinema.
On Point
Participants: David Altmejd, James Stuart Blackton, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Buckminster Fuller, Elliot Green, Ben Hagari, Jasper Johns, Joan Jonas, William Kentridge, Jon Kessler, Dr. Lakra, Ofra Lapid, Len Lye, Lothar Meggendorfer, Jonas Mekas, Lotte Reiniger, Aki Sasamoto, Dasha Shishkin, Shahzia Sikander, Kiki Smith, Sarah Sze, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tomas Vu-Daniel, Kara Walker, George Laws Weinberg, and Terry Winters
Curator: Ben Hagari
Assistant Curator: Ofra Lapid
In collaboration with the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies in the School of the Arts at Columbia University, New York
The exhibition On Point is a result of the curator’s ongoing personal exploration of the history and mechanisms of moving images. Early moving images, prior to the invention of the film camera, were works on paper created through printmaking. At a time of handwriting's rapid disappearance, this exhibition begs the necessity of creating things by hand, of idiosyncratic production and work born from dreams.
The exhibition includes etchings, collages, engravings, movable books, peepholes, silhouettes, films, animation, and new video works, alongside historical works from archives and collections. Historical works are presented in theatrical environments that seem to project the space of early cinema outside itself, much as the visible world is projected within the brain from information passed through the eye holes.
A wiggly or dancing line emerges from the pieces into the space and vice versa, linking together the various exhibition rooms. The line that “comes alive” follows the movement of the drawing hand like an act of magic. The exhibition blurs the distinction between humans and things, between objects and their users, and between live action and animation, and considers hand-made moving images as a theme, a form, and a worldview.
Ivan Schwebel
FSP Free-Standing Painting
Co-curated by Dr. Aya Lurie and Ori Drumer
More than a decade after Ivan Schwebel (1932–2011) passed away, this exhibition seeks to renew the acquaintance with the artist and his work. Through the vast archival material he left behind, and among the hundreds of his paintings, drawings, engravings and work journals, a total, driven artist is revealed, for whom painting was an existential need and a refuge.
His work journals reflect his life much as a storyboard reflects a movie, at times like a graphic novel. They highlight elements in his artwork such as cinematic thought, cartoon-like dynamic aesthetics, and American culture.
Schwebel was born in the United States. In 1963, after years of wandering – between Kyoto, Paris, New York, Athens, Cordova, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem – he settled in Ein Karem, Jerusalem. His paintings featured in exhibitions at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv Museum, the Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod, and more. While his talent was immediately recognized, his frustration mounted as he gradually found himself working increasingly outside the mainstream.
In Schwebel’s work there is a fundamental connection between the act of painting and the world of cinema, the photographed image and cinematic editing. The cinematic cut creates an utter and immediate transition from one field of view to another, a jump back and forth in time and space. Schwebel recounted that for him the canvas was like a cinematic screen that allows the impossible to happen. He often painted large curtains on either side of the canvas, as in an old movie theater, delimiting the imaginary space. These paintings, full of pathos, convey creative intensity. In many of his works, etchings or landscapes (urban or natural) are used as a substrate for painting, much like an architectural film set.
In Schwebel’s mind, images of current affairs ran wild side by side with episodes from Jewish history. Thus, for example, his paintings show images from old documentaries and photographs from the Holocaust period – figures of humiliated Jews and Nazi soldiers –along with images representing the expulsion of the Jews from Spain through the grotesque figures of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella (possibly referencing Fellini, whose films he admired); antisemitic iconography; various figures from the history of art; and American cultural and cinematic icons, highlighting his affinity with popular culture.
In his FSP – Free-Standing Painting project from the 1970s, Schwebel constructed walls and placed them at various sites in Israel. The Free-Standing Painting might also be seen as a representation of the painter himself –standing free and apart. The walls, which were supposed to serve as a support for landscape paintings, come across as drive-in screens that stand in isolation, at once rooted in the site and alien and distinct from it. Schwebel envisioned creating a similar project throughout New York City, as evident from a series of images he conceived with renditions of urban collages that combined photography and painting. These plans, which never came to fruition, bring to mind the rhetoric of billboards, and underline Schwebel’s strong urge to link together art with everyday life and the street.
Aviva Uri: La Forza Del Destino
Works from the Benno Kalev Collection
Curator: Benno Kalev
Researcher and collector Benno Kalev curated Aviva Uri’s exhibition, La Forza Del Destino, based on his unique art collection, which is centered on paper-based works. For years, with passion and deep commitment, Kalev has assembled a collection of the best works of modern artists active in Israel. The current exhibition attests to the dialogue between Uri and Kalev, which was one between a collector and a work of art. It was love at first sight, which grew stronger with every new work of hers that he saw. Another dialogue that is apparent in the exhibition is the romantic relationship between Uri and David Hendler – in the form of Hendler’s drawings as well as in notes – love notes and quotidian ones – exchanged between the two. Also included are works by Uri that had been donated to the collection of Herzliya Museum by the late curator Yona Fischer, and portraits of her by photographer Avraham Hay.
Aviva Uri passed away on September 1, 1989. In her lifetime, her works were exhibited at the best galleries, and in almost all the museums in the country. Thanks to these exhibitions she gained a canonical status of a groundbreaking artist and “a painters’ painter.” Her handling of paper and the virtuosity of her line influenced the leading artists of her time, who followed every innovation and development in her works with keen interest.
In 2005, a large retrospective of Uri’s work was held at the Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod (curated by Galia Bar Or and Jean-François Chevrier), but otherwise, since her passing, her works have only been on display at a few small “memorial exhibitions,” some of which were for sale purposes. Only a few of her works have been included in the permanent collection exhibitions of Israel’s major museums. What chance is there, even for a great artist of Uri’s caliber, to continue influencing contemporary Israeli culture, when her works are so rarely exhibited?
Benno Kalev recounts that for over five decades now, he has been trying, through his art selections as a collector, to get to know himself better – to examine what made him prefer this artist or that; to see, with hindsight, whether there were any criteria that unknowingly guided him at the time. After all, when he acquires a certain painting, he is not only connecting with the artist’s work, but also with a part of his own self – a part of his personality or an unfulfilled dream of his.
The exhibition examines the fine line between the creative force and obsessiveness for its own sake. Already in Uri’s early works, of the 1950s and early 1960s, most of her artistic vocabulary is clearly discernible. In some of her works the line is clean, fluid, clear and austere, and fully under her control, but in other works it is clear that from the moment her pencil touched the paper, the line itself was in charge.
Rotem Amizur: The Flatland
Curator: Iddo Markus
The Flatland is a monumental project that began with Rotem Amizur’s chance encounter with a small and faded reproduction of one panel out of nine from The Triumphs of Caesar (1484–92), a famous painting by the Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna. She produced countless interpretations of the painting’s structure, with strong and vibrating colors, in a mixed technique of painting and collage. Her project does not seek to explore the painting, nor does it seek to imitate or copy it, but to reveal its underlying themes and construct a different melody from them.
Amizur’s hybrid language, one between painting and collage, is founded on a variety of artistic traditions. At the same time, she draws inspiration from quilting and textile techniques. She does not hide the process of making the work: Thousands of tiny holes in the pieces of paper that make up the collages attest to the changes they underwent in the creative process – a kind of map documenting the movement of her hands as they created and changed, in their attempt to cast an anchor. The raw material in Amizur’s works is simple white paper, uniformly painted in flat industrial paints. These simple pieces of papers serve as the basis for diverse complex operations and surprising encounters. Amizur’s cut-up pieces of papers are like continents floating tectonically on a flat earth, and the result is a spectacular sight, whose simplicity arises from masterful craftsmanship.
The exhibition is the result of a prolonged dialogue between Amizur and the curator, the artist Iddo Markus. The two have been working for the past decade as part of a collective of artists in Haifa.
