Michal Chelbin | Daydreamers
The exhibition “Daydreamers” is Michal Chelbin’s second solo exhibition at the Chelouche Gallery and is dedicated to fashion photography, including projects created by Chelbin for leading fashion houses such as Dior, Lanvin, and Gucci. The works in this exhibition constitute a rich theme of fascinating visual work that takes place locally and internationally. Chelbin has […]
Yadid Rubin – Works 1953-2011
Artist Yadid Rubin is considered one of the most established artists in Israel, his paintings express the beautiful “Israeliness” of the kibbutz landscapes, tractors in vast plowed fields, citrus groves, and cypress boulevards; Disappearing landscapes and, continue to exist in his paintings, free from visible dependencies; Rubin, as known, painted in a studio that had […]
Moonshine
The opening exhibition of 2023 in Chelouche Gallery’s new space is the exhibition of the artist Gideon Gachtman (1942 – 2008), one of the pillars of Israeli art, and Michelangelo Pistoletto (born in 1933). Both have been among Chelouche’s artists for over three decades. Gachtman, one of the leading Israeli artists and the pioneers of […]
Chelouche Gallery Annual Exhibition
On display collection of gallery artists, including rare works from the 70’s and 80’s.
Pekin Opera Facing Design and Augmented Reality
Since the beginning of my artistic journey, I have used masks, whether traditional Japanese Noh Masks or popular and funny plastic masks. The masks present an element of distance that has always interested me” – ORLAN In this exhibition, pioneering artist ORLAN, continues to blur the boundaries between art, anthropology, technology, and science. The series […]
Passage International No.2
“Passage” International Art Encounters Project No.2 Nira Itzhaki The joint exhibition between the British artist David Mach and the Israeli artist Zadok Ben-David is the second in a series of international “Passage” encounters at the Chelouche Gallery for Contemporary Art. The project, which started in November 1996 in cooperation with Dr. Lóránd Hegyi, the director […]
The Slave Song
The artist Amir Nave inaugurates the new space of the Chelouche Gallery in Old Jaffa with the exhibition “The Slave Song”. Nave (48), Born in Be’er Sheva, lives and works now in Jaffa, Paris and York. The exhibition ”The Slave Song”, which will open on September 8, is the third part in a trilogy whose […]
Poetic Sun
Link to text written by Nira Itzhaki (In Hebrew): ‘Yadid Rubin: The Last Eretz Israel Painter’
Rooms
Eight Artists were invited to present their works at the exhibition ‘ROOMS’: Tal Amitai-Lavi, Nadav Weissman, Dana Yoeli, Shai Yehezkeli, Amir Naveh, Tomer Sapir, Assaf Rahat and Tal Shoshan. On this occasion new bodies of work are unveiled in various mediums and creative processes that are usually hidden from view.
Food Weave
The exhibition draws its inspiration from the idea of a “Food Weave”. The concept originates in the field of ecology and relates to different food chains that operate in nature and have diverse interactions among them. Plants and animals are food for other living things in different relationships of producers and consumers. The exhibition seeks […]
Make / Believe
Curators: Nira Itzhaki, Nimrod Vainer In Michal Chelbin’s new exhibition photographs from five series, which Chelbin has created since the early 2000s until these days, are shown. At the center of the pieces, young adults are apparent – the heroines and heroes of the show. Chelbin has portraited these during photography excursions in Russia, Eastern […]
ZANGA ZANGA
The works included in the exhibition “ZANGA ZANGA” share parallel themes – representations of moments of collapse, ghosts, hybridity, repetition, and transitions between languages – while reenacting iconic political events, some of which occurred in the Arab world this past year.
What’s Going On In The Field Now
Pinchas Zinovich’s abstract painting is born of oppositions: between idiom and motifs; between abstract expression and the wish to employ common visual or verbal codes. The special place he occupies in Israeli art is the result of these oppositions. Zinovich proposes an ambivalent painterly position, hovering between the abstract and the non-abstract. He does not follow in the footsteps of the New Horizons group or of traditional, figurative, narrative art. He is characterized by very expressive painting, which is not based on concrete imagery but on color and on presenting the creative process.
William Kentridge 2005
This is William Kentridge's first solo exhibition in Israel. Born in 1955 in Johannesburg, South Africa where he still lives and works, William Kentridge is known for his socially and politically involved work, and has gained international recognition for his distinctive animated short films and for the charcoal drawings on which they are based. His drawings, animated films and videos, and theater and opera productions focus on the intimate, personal narratives of daily existence, and provide both a view into and contrast to the greater political and historical context from which they are drawn.
The exhibition features William Kentridge’s recent animated film, Tide Table (2003), along with numerous graphics that feature different aspects of his work and the issues he deals with. In the film Tide Table Kentridge returns to filming charcoal and pastel drawings on paper to create an elegiac work on youth, maturity, illness, awareness, worry, indolence and perhaps even destiny. Kentridge also chooses to returns to his protagonist Soho Eckstein, the industrialist and real-estate entrepreneur prominent in earlier works. The image of Soho, one of Johannesburg major developers in its early days, is portrayed on the beach as both the stage of events and their erasure are created by the white frothy waves of Tide Table.
The prints and graphics accompanying this exhibition, set the atmosphere for this unique artist, and were somewhat inspired by Svevo's novel: Confessions of Zeno.
Since participating in Dokumenta X in Kassel in 1997, solo shows of Kentridge's work have been hosted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and MCA San Diego. Moreover, throughout the years, Kentridge exhibited vastly worldwide. During 1998 and 1999, a survey exhibition of his work was seen in Brussels, Munich, Barcelona, London, Marseille and Graz. A survey show in 2001 in Washington, traveled to New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and Cape Town. A shadow oratorio, Confessions of Zeno, was created for Documenta XI in 2002; A new survey exhibition, which travels to museums in Turin, Dusseldorf, Sydney, Montreal and Johannesburg, opened in 2004.
At the moment, Kentridge is directing a production of Mozart’s Magic Flute commissioned by La Monnaie in Brussels; also scheduled for 2005 is a commissioned project for the Guggenheim Museum in Berlin.
Kentridge was awarded in 1999 the Carnegie Medal at the Carnegie International 1999/2000, and in October 2003 Kentridge received the Goslar Kaisserring in recognition of his contribution to contemporary art.
Works
Miki Kratsman // Works
Hadas Maor
Miki Kratsman is one of Israel's highly distinguished photographers. For over 22 years he has been infinitely committed to seriously documenting the evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and mainly, its bitter consequences on the daily life of the Palestinian population. From Kratsman's point of view, an accumulated documentation of this difficult daily routine – a routine comprised of different kinds of obstruction, death, memory, hope, insult, anger, hatred or acceptance – is more important, significant and even disquieting than any specific documentation of a potentially spectacular or extreme event .
The works exhibited in this show are, in some way, a unique collection gathered from this massive line of work. They include a combination of different techniques and diverse ways of observation. They were all taken beyond the green line, a concept that turned somewhat anachronistic in the last few years, while deliberating on certain generative phenomena. The separation wall, Road 443, Gush Katif and more.
The first exhibition hall includes color photographs taken at Gilo, Khan Yunis, Erez barrier, Jenin and more. The characterization of the separation wall on its different facades; the destruction of houses; the gateway administration; the phenomenon of the wanted armed men. In his early works Kratsman focused on the mediation of complex human situations, while intentionally stressing the way his actual presence in the field of occurrence functions as an active force, both influencing it and being affected by it. In the current show the focus is on defining the general state of affairs in a broad and principle manner, and not on distinct individual description. Most of the photographs are devoid of any direct human presence. Quiet photographs, almost pastoral, unrevealing and at the same time refining the fact they are connected with such a difficult and painful situation.
The other exhibition hall includes photographs in black and white only; A series that was taken at Gush Katif during 2005, just a few months before the media-covered evacuation. The series exposes a silent, emptied out abandoned place in which the swing of settlement and wasteland flourishing seems to have evaporated or as if it had never really existed. The drama in these works is not in the ongoing occurrence seen in them but rather in the meaning derived from it. The series demonstrates the dimension of fracture embodied in the situation, in a principal absolute manner, without connecting it to the political or ideological stance in relation to its circumstances. Kratsman's choice of the unique photographic format that creates a dark halo around the image and a focus on the object at the center of the lens creates a past tense and produces a feeling of remembrance. By doing so, the act of photography serves Kratsman not only as a possible mediator of the act of lamentation, of separation, but also as a catalyst that wishes to urge it.
The juxtaposition of the two sections of the show within one frame of thought is not attempting to indicate a connection of cause and effect, but to create a continual and rudimentary succession that binds the two sides of the separation wall together. A wall that is like a redundant scar in the landscape, that as an unattended cut, grew wild dermis, ledges, salients, pits and endless infections.
Works from the 70’s
Zigi Ben-Haim | Works from the 70's
Curator: Nira Itzhaki
01.01.2015 – 07.02.2015
The exhibition Zigi Ben-Haim | Works from the 70's is dedicated to artworks of this period that marks the breakthrough of the artist's artistic career, and which set an example for young artists of then and now. The exhibition showcases Ben-Haim's exceptionally powerful and unique collages on paper from the 70's, titled Formation in Paper series.
During the 1970's, after completing his studies, Zigi Ben-Haim arrived in Soho, New York, where he resides and works till this day. Being an immigrant distorts the personal image of reality, a state of mind that motivates the search after one's own roots. In this series of works from the 70's, Ben-Haim emphasized the presence of the absence at the core of its existence, where only the traces of the process can be evident and experienced. Ben-Haim demonstrates this by the act of pulling ropes which lay between layers of pieces of paper. The discarded paper was collected from the industrial neighborhood, where he lived and worked; newspapers, brown paper and scrap papers disposed from sewing factories, were mounted in picturesque compositions stacked one on top of the other, holding the ropes that eventually were pulled with force. This action left tracks which cut through the layered paper and left deep linear slits in the works themselves.
The dynamic energy of the rope becomes the manifestation of its absence -the quest for identity is present in the process. As Ben-Haim stated “The process, which realizes the work, is composed by stages of construction, pulling and reduction. The rope is an allegory to an earthquake and the cracks that follow it. Also symbolic to the marks that are left by the accumulation of knowledge in people.” The ropes in Ben-Haim's works are linked to the power and violence of nature.
The 70's were turbulent years in the art world, minimalism flourished. However in contrast to artists of the time, Ben-Haim was using minimalism as a tool not as a goal. Many art critics noted the importance, originality and innovation of Ben-Haim's art. Among them, Yigal Zalmona who wrote in 1977 on Ben-Haim “His courage to change a course of action is what secured for him a prestigious position among forefront artists in the USA.” The art critic Joan Marter, a contributor to ARTS Magazine, affiliated him with the tradition of “White on White” as part of the motto “less is more” that began with Malevich's painting from 1918.
Zigi Ben-Haim is considered to be one of the main and innovative artists that were concerned with the mark of body gesture on paper, and a leader of a new method of sculptural drawings that encompass layers of history and memory.
“The 70's are the foundation of my work till today. The cultural transition is manifested in the tracks carved in the layers of the waste paper collected. A material that in itself represents the history of a culture” – Zigi Ben-Haim
From the press:
Zigi Ben-Haim in an interview on i24 News (Published on 06.01.2015, 02:44 min) – Link
Zigi Ben-Haim in Conversation With Curator Nira Itzhaki on Jewish Business News (Published On: Thu, Jan 15th, 2015) – Link
Yadid Rubin 2002
Yadid Rubin is one of Israel’s most prominent artists. The exhibition features 16 new paintings, oil on canvas, from the previous two years. Yadid Rubin, born 1938, lives and works in Kibutz Givat Haim Yichud. Rubin’s paintings express remarkably and beautifully the meaning of the allusive term “Israeli characteristics”: the landscape of the kibutz, vast […]
Yadid Rubin 2004
Yadid Rubin, born 1938, lives and works in Kibutz Givat Haim Yichud. He arrives at his studio every morning, until noontime. He paints with sweeping dynamics that carries him into the climax, and then he brakes away from the painting, abandons the studio and returns the next day. Time and time again.
Rubin's paintings express remarkably and beautifully the meaning of the allusive
Term “Israeli characteristics”: the landscape of the kibutz, vast plowed fields, plantations filled with fruitful trees, columns of cypresses, houses and tractors. Small buildings and open spaces long gone live on in his paintings, free from dependence on the visible to the eye. “I paint the landscape of the kibutz, but in fact these are the landscapes of the soul. I don't paint out of plain observation, but out of the accumulation of sensations and reactions to different conditions of nature”, says Rubin.
Rubin's approach to painting is very personal and with clear pictorial style, much like Michael Gross and Rubin's long personal friend- Uri Reizman. Apparent in Rubin's work are the impressionist influences of Van Gouch with whom Rubin corresponds through the image of landscape, and through pictorial work with thick layers of paint and shapes constructed out of brush strokes that appear to be thrown on the canvas with great restrained force. For Rubin, the landscape is a semantic field of signs, replacing the realistic and naturalistic conventions of forms. Like Van Gouch, his point of view is subjective; but contrasting the agonizing and religious perception of Van Gouch, Rubin's perception is secular, free and full of optimism.
Rubin paints sitting on the floor or standing across from a canvas that leans on a chair. He smears the paint with his bare hands, with a spatula, with brushes or strait from the tube. His style is intense and dense with lush brilliant colorfulness. The colorful patterns repeat themselves to create an organized totality. The fields of form and color are constructed of a repeating rhythm of lines, dote and circle. This rhythm balances the continuance pulse of vertical and horizontal into a harmonic structure reminiscent of jazz music, creating a strong sensation of vitality and abundance, which seem to want to break the limits of the canvas.
