JERUSALEM.- The Israel Museum announces a new exhibition showcasing the creative production of Yehudit Sasportas, one of the most prominent Israeli artists working today, in a unique and all-encompassing installation created especially for the Museum. Featuring primarily new work, Yehudit Sasportas: Seven Winters displays films alongside signature sculptures and drawings that are monumental in scale, charting the evolution of the artist's imagery of primordial landscapes and modernistic architecture. Sasportas, who lives and works in Berlin and Tel Aviv, is perhaps best known as the featured artist in the Israeli pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Regularly exhibited in galleries in Europe, the United States and Israel, this is her first solo museum exhibition in over a decade and her first solo exhibition at the Israel Museum. Yehudit Sasportas: Seven Winters is on view from May 28 through October 19, 2013.

The artist's vision of an exhibition that is not separated into individual works but is rather a whole work in itself, organized in a cumulative manner, creates an experience that is sensory and personal. Visitors entering the installation are transported to an alternative universe of black-and-white forest and marsh landscapes and a visual vacillation between the conscious and the subconscious. Walking though the installation is like drifting along a stream of consciousness, an associative journey encompassing objects and images, times and places. Some of the times are personal: a childhood crib that Sasportas created more than twenty years ago, followed by highlights of her work from different periods in her artistic biography, until we reach the timelessness of her more recent evocations of a primordial world. The installation also embraces a geographic expanse, from her father’s carpentry workshop in Ashdod to her own studio in Berlin; from a marshy landscape in northwest Germany to an inner landscape of consciousness, memory, and oblivion. The journey through the rooms of this installation culminates in the new large-scale film Vortex of Separation (2013), which features floating objects – a piano, oil drums, natural debris –that are part of Sasportas’ visual narrative.

Yehudit Sasportas: Seven Winters is curated by Mira Lapidot, Yulla and Jacques Lipchitz Chief Curator of the Fine Arts. An English-Hebrew catalogue accompanies the exhibition.