This exhibition does not seek to establish any equivalence or common ground between the participating artists, but to explore their distinct approaches to the sculptural process and their choices of materials. The title of the exhibition refers to the scientific process of fatigue, which explains the behavior of materials when subjected to loads and consequently exposed to collapse or fracture. This concept used as a metaphor for the nature of the encounter between the five artists, which at first sight seems impossible, chaotic and full of diverse and incomprehensible materiality.
The exhibition was born out of both personal and academic interest in the subject of the central role of material in contemporary art. This is well witnessed in museums’ shows, local galleries and graduates exhibitions, which indicate the artists’ attraction to visual wealth- sensory and sensual- as well as their knowledge and proficiency in varied materials. It seems as though this trend comes as an antithesis to the deliberate sloppiness of the “Want of Matter” aesthetics, which according to the curator, Sarah Breitberg-Semel, one of its characteristics is the abandonment of the material world in favor of an estranged intellectualism.[1]
And thus, the poor and unrefined object, which is nothing but a vessel, an initial platform for the work of art, is taken away by spectacular materiality, which dictates the work’s content, and serves as a thematic anchor and a basis to the aesthetic experience.
The participating artists represent different approaches to sculpture, and to material in particular, aiming at emphasizing the relentless richness of their work, ranging between different and even opposing poles – whether they are working with traditional materials such as stone and ceramics or their use of other mediums such as video and sound, which stretches and challenges the boundaries of the matter.
The exhibition was organised in a way that demands a slow and detailed viewing, its “theme” will not necessarily be revealed by attempting to unite the sum of the visual images but rather their dissolution, in the quiet and meditative viewing and in the experience of each work by its material.
An exceptional approach towards sculpture can be seen in the work of Uri Shapira, a graduate of the ceramics & glass design department at Bezalel academy. Shapira’s sculptural perception, seemingly remote from the traditional definition of the medium, is fully exposed in a self nurturing cycle – between object, video and photography, all of which produce spectacular and seductive visual images. Shapira often describes his work as a monster that is never in a stable state, but growing and distorting, devouring and devoured, constantly changing its face and form, even after the work has been completed and set in the gallery space, where it ends - exhausted and destructed.
Shapira abandons the ceramist materials and his tool, the oven, which stabilizes the material, makes it static and absolute, and moves to kind of a “live” sculpture – still life growings that behave as a living organism.
Shapira’s sculptural process begins in the studio, in a pseudo-scientific action, sort of an alchemy practice, in an effort to examine and document chemical reactions between various materials such as zinc, hydrogen and lead. These materials confined in glass aquariums, and exist as a territory to a sculptural potential. Video and photography are additional tools that illustrate and enhance Shapira’s sculptural field. His enormous photographic works freeze the magnificent microscopic world, presenting marvelous biomorphic forms and magical abstract landscapes, almost touchable. However, his video work, conducted in a stop motion technique, describing the evolution of his growings in time, as documented in thousands of stills images, taken for days- from the moment of creation to their foretold death.
Liat Iris‘ sculpture, like Shapira’s, is also a multimedia encounter of object, photography, sound and painting. Overflow is a hallmark of her work, manifested both in the combination of different materials and in the enigmatic angles, distortions and illogical visual images, all of which serve the thematic basis of her work. Iris’s sculptural materials outline a world with its own regularities, having no discipline to time or space – they stretch, liquefy, tiring and resisting. The matter and content, for Iris, support each other, seeking to provide an expression to the undescribed, perhaps the noise that floods the consciousness.
Iris’ new work, Ivory Tower, is an installation that perpetuates her language of multiplicity – a black painted angular wooden box is carrying a wrecked basaltic construction. This pedestal also serves as a resonance box to a disturbing sound, bits of syllables taken from a fiery speech. Iris is playing with the voice, teasing and twisting it, responding to it with an irritating melody played on two untuned piano chords, kind of an absurd muttering orchestration or meaningless Dadaist singing. The phallic object is observed by a monocle lens with a sandy texture, and inside it – a multi layered image that seems liquid or twitching. Accompanying the enigmatic Ivory Tower is a floor based painting that responds to the installation with a dynamic momentum, sort of an echo to the existential setting showing in the exhibition.
Avinoam Sternheim‘s works correspond with a long tradition in art of recycled materials. Metals, slices of wood, wires, broken furniture, feathers, seeds and eggs, waste and debris which was collected from the street – remnants of other people’s lives – these are Sternheim’s raw materials, in which he sees a potential for materialistic transformation and renewal. These materials themselves lack any grace and often create a sense of rejection and embarrassment in the gallery space but in a slow and laborious progress, with no preparation, while listening to the materials and their internal rhythmic, their meager nature changes and they transform to large-scale objects, with theatrical quality.
Unlike the four other artists in the exhibition, who avoid poor and unrefined materials, Sternheim finds in it a fertile ground to a spectacular and sensual wealth, transcending its dailiness – an antithesis to the “want of matter” and to the Duchampian banal and anonymous object.
Zohar Gotesman‘s material language is a hybrid of ancient and contemporary. Gotesman, a graduate of the Art Department at the Bezalel Academy and a Bachelor’s degree graduate in archeology, is a master of classic materials, stone is the most predominant, but he sabotages the meticulous traditional techniques, whose mysteries he studied in Italy’s Carrera, and in a defiant act he implants ingredients that are strange to his material, as well as contents that describe absurd and ridiculous situations.
The junction between the luxurious material, mostly imported marble or limestone, which in the past, had been used for monumental and religious proposes, and the humorous content, undermine the material’s characteristic and internal logic. In this exhibition, Gotesman is showing three works that celebrating the marginal, the grotesque and bestial, sort of an amusing version of the Gothic gargoyles figures. Next to two heavy stone works is a sculpture made of plastic, as if attempting to disguise to his brother, the “Shitting Dog”. The cheap and artificial plastic, whose elasticity allows it to resemble any other material, overcast the heavy and noble presence of the stone, as if wishing to mock it.
Daniella Azoulay is also an artist of traditional material – ceramics. Azoulay, like Shapira, is a graduate of the Department of Ceramic and glass design at Bezalel, apparently, one of the profound departments to gain material knowledge. The work of the two is completely differ one from the other, perhaps representing two opposite poles of approaches to material – while Azoulay devoting herself to the classic ceramic material, Shapira never returned to use it since his graduating.
Ceramics is usually associated decorative work related to design purposes, but Azoulay is not drawn to the functionality of this material, but to its fragile elasticity. Her work process is spontaneous and intuitive – she allows the material to crack, break and tire, not afraid of an unfinished product, on the contrary, she continues to work on it, sometimes with rough and “unclean” way, putting the pieces back together and continues to create crude and massive textures, but at the same time, insists on the soft and fragile transparency characterizing the ceramic.
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(1) The Want of Matter was a name of an exhibition curated by Breitberg-Semel in which she coined this phrase in relation to a genre in 1970’s Israeli art, sort of an equivalent to the Arte Povera movement:
Sarah Breitberg Semel, The Want of Matter: a Quality in Israeli Art, 1986, exhibition catalog, Tel Aviv Museum