JERUSALEM.- The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, inaugurates its Israeli Art Season, featuring four new exhibitions showcasing the work of emerging and established artists in a variety of disciplines. From realist painter Israel Hershberg to video artist Nelly Agassi and painter Joshua Borkovsky, these exhibitions highlight the Israel Museum's rich holdings in Israeli art, complemented by important loans and works from the Museum's international contemporary art collection. In conjunction with the Season's opening, the Museum will also host Review-Preview, a two-day symposium exploring Israel’s creative arts in the 21st century.

"The Museum is committed to gathering and presenting the rich texture of Israel’s creative output in the visual arts, featuring the work of recognized artists of the past and present, alongside that of promising younger talents," said James Snyder, Anne and Jerome Fisher Director. "In the spirit of this commitment, we are proud to inaugurate this Israeli Art Season."

Fields of Vision: Landscapes by Israel Hershberg
Through February 4, 2013
One of Israel's preeminent realist painters, Israel Hershberg's multifaceted career as an artist, teacher, and founding director of the Jerusalem Studio School has added a new dimension to the canon of Israeli art over the past four decades. Known for his close, direct, and unrelenting powers of observation, Hershberg has, over the past ten years, broadened the scope of his own artistic production, moving from still lifes and interiors to expansive landscapes, each panorama the result of extended and painstaking work. Fields of Vision presents three large-scale landscapes and a preparatory study, produced in Italy and Israel, representing a pivotal chapter in Hershberg's oeuvre. The exhibition is curated by Amitai Mendelsohn, Curator, David Orgler Department of Israeli Art.

Nelly Agassi: Video Work
Through April 2, 2013
This exhibition explores the video work of Israeli artist Nelly Agassi from the beginning of her artistic career in the mid-1990s to today. In the ten works on view, Agassi uses her body as a platform for presenting repetitive actions dealing with womanhood, emotional experience, and physical pain. While her work documents these actions with an immediacy that resonates with the art of the 1970s, which often placed the body at the forefront, the intimacy of her creativity distinguishes Agassi from those artists who used the body for ideological purposes. Agassi is a wide-ranging artist who works in video, on paper, and in embroidery, creating installations and engaging in performance art. However, her videos are at the core of her work, creating a powerful and enduring link between the private and the public, the intimate and the exposed, and inviting the spectator to enter the artist's world and undergo an intense emotional experience. Nelly Agassi is curated by Amitai Mendelsohn, Curator, David Orgler Department of Israeli Art.

Great Wide Open: New and Old in the Collection
Through April 2, 2013
Since the Romantic era, artists have been fascinated by seascapes and desert landscapes -- their infinitude, the dangers inherent in them, and the catharsis they offer. Challenged by their predominantly abstract forms and textures, painters and photographers alike have struggled to capture the vast, ungraspable plain devoid of a distinct beginning and end. Approximately sixty works by Israeli and international artists are on view, including recently acquired works alongside others from the Museum's collections. Juxtaposing older and more recent examples, the exhibition re-contextualizes the periods, movements, and mindsets that underscore the multilayered quality of the Museum’s holdings. Among the artists whose works are on display are: Mordecai Ardon, Arie Aroch, Gustav Courbet, Joseph Dadoune, Ori Gersht, Dani Karavan, Liat Livni, Uri Nir, Ezra Orion, and Gilad Ratman. Great Wide Open is curated by Amitai Mendelsohn, Curator, David Orgler Department of Israeli Art.

Veronese Green
Joshua Borkovsky: Paintings, 1987-2012
Through April 2, 2013
This comprehensive exhibition features 58 works by the prominent Jerusalem-based artist Joshua Borkovsky, selected from ten cycles of paintings spanning 25 years. Many of Borkovsky's works are inspired by myth and involve elements of repetition, shadow, and reflection. Three of the cycles from the past decade – Echo and Narcissus, Vera-Icon, and Apelles' Line – stand at the exhibition’s core, complemented by artworks from this same period and from the 1980s. Together they offer an integral body of work, in which each unit resonates with the others. Veronese Green is curated by guest curator Moshe Ninio, with Associate Curator of Israeli Art Aya Miron.