JERUSALEM.- The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, announced the receipt of an important gift of 59 prints for its Department of Prints and Drawings. The prints, by five contemporary artists, were donated by the Fred Jahn Gallery in Munich, which concentrates in contemporary art. The artists include Austrian Herman Nitsch (ten lithographs), Americans Fred Sandback (22 lithographs) and Barry Le Va, (four lithographs, three diptych lithographs and three woodcuts), as well as work by Germans Rudi Tröger and Franz Hitzler. The addition of these prints to the department’s collection is of great importance, as these significant artists were not represented until now in the department's sizeable collection of over 50,000 works.

The artists:

Franz Hitzler, born in Thalmassing, Bavaria, in 1946, is a unique phenomenon in contemporary art. He creates a new kind of figurative art using the graphic print as a means of defining personal statements.
Born in Long Beach, California, in 1941, Barry Le Va uses the floor as his field of operation and scatters about large amounts of materials and forms, including drawings. His lithography work, beginning in 1990, grew out of his work in sculpture.

Fred Sandback, born in Bronxville, New York, in 1943, created works that are minimal and literal prior to his untimely death at the age of 59 in 2003. The prints are part the series Twenty-Two Constructions from 1967.
Born in 1929 in Marktleuthen, Franconia, Rudi Troger creates prints that are characterized by an eccentric linear style, reminiscent of Alberto Giacometti.

Hermann Nitsch, born in Vienna in 1938, is known for his experimental and multimedia works, as well as performance art. He is associated with the Vienna Actionists, and, like them, considers his art outside traditional categories of genre.

The Department of Prints and Drawings is one of the Israel Museum’s most esteemed collections and is comprised of some 50,000 drawings, prints, and illustrated books from the sixteenth century to the present, with particular emphasis on Israeli art. Among the artists represented are a wide range of European and American artists including Marc Chagall, Eugène Delacroix, Albrecht Dürer, Francisco Goya, Wassily Kandinsky, Parmigianino, Pablo Picasso and Rembrandt; contemporary artists such as Jasper Johns, Susan Rothenberg and Kiki Smith; and Israeli artists as Moshe Kupferman, Yaacov Pins, Jakob Steinhardt and Calman Shemi.