The Pulsating Room
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 […]
Basic Basic English
Chelouche Gallery is happy to announce the opening of </sandbox> our new Digital Art Platform! Join us for the first </sandbox> online opening: Lior Zalmanson – Basic Basic English Solo Exhibition 19.12.2022 (8PM CET / 9 PM Tel Aviv) link to the event: https://distant.gallery/basic-basic-english in collaboration with DISTANTGALLERY.COM ‘Basic Basic English’ proposes a possibility of dialogue […]
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 […]
Folding Scenery
Nadav Weissman’s exhibition, Folding Scenery, is a multi-layer installation of plywood sheets and digital projections snaking along the gallery walls and protruding into its space. Like a cut-and-pasted folded landscape, this jigsaw puzzle of physical and organic parts takes its forms from natural environments and the human body; creating a topographic view of invented territories. […]
The Slave Age
Following a global apocalypse, individuals from around the country gathered en masse for what appears to be an endless caravan, a procession without a clear purpose or destination–perhaps the sole reason for action in a hollow space that rejects any interpretation. Disdain for the notion that, within this huge, stifling order, someone–a person or a […]
Take Me Out of Here
Curator: Irena Gordon We step into a landscape which is an interior, a hidden space whose walls have been breached, revealing it in all its familiarity and strangeness. The space is inviting, drawing us in with its tactile sensuality, its formal richness, and the interrelations between the various objects within it. As we go in […]
Underground 2
Site-specific installation at Dana Gallery, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai Birch, plywood and charcoal, video mapping animation, Variable dimensions.
Slippery Slope
Smadar Keren Text for “Slippery Slope”, Beit Uri and Rami Nehoshtan Museum, 2021 Two series of paintings from the past year are at the core of Shai Yehezkelli’s exhibition. `Star of Redemption,’ a grouping of four works, each with a flawed star at its center, and ‘Slippery Slope,’ a trio of paintings that feature […]
Ballade to the Double
“Ballade to the Double” 17.3.2022-9.7.2022 Curator: Rotem Zuta. Ballade to the Double draws the viewer into a Connecticut train ride filmed over the course of a year. All four New England seasons are projected simultaneously, sideby-side, in a way that transforms our usual experience of time and landscape. The journey is seen from the front […]
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’
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.
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.
With Philistines
With Philistines | Avi Katz
Text for the exhibition “With Philistines”, Jule M. Gallery, Tel-Aviv, 2014
With Philistines (and in the exhibition: Samson [Self-portrait as], and also Self-portrait as a Happy Infiltrator): a declaration of ultimate otherness which is razor sharp and possesses the daring of a liminal painter, but is also crippled and even wide open to interpretation and castrated: the present absence of the beginning of the verse “Let me die”, as well as the echoes of these difficult times (many of the artworks in the exhibition were painted in the anguish of Operation Protective Edge) as well as an alternative reading that invokes the use of “philistine” as a moniker for those who show a crude contempt for intellectual and artistic values. Indeed, Yehezkelli's paintings offer a reversal of hierarchies that presume to distinguish between the proper manners of representation and the demonstrably outsider “bad painting”, which may affiliate him with that “omnivorousness” (to use the term coined by the sociologist Richard Peterson) – the highbrow crowd whose taste tends towards “everything…”
In his new paintings, Shai Yehezkelli continues to consistently develop a visual language of signs, which is multilayered, borrowed, and appropriated (from the The Birds' Head Haggadah to comic books and emoticons, from Stars of David to a cowboy with a cigarette) but also personal, veiled, and enigmatic. The viewer is invited on a journey of revelations that will somehow transform paint stains to shapes (the stain, claims Lacan, marks that which returns to the viewer from the painting, the presence of an object that cannot be seen). The act of painting celebrates a lively freedom of color and shape to the point of “excess” at times, but also presents its faltering and depletion.
In Yehezkelli's “presentation of 'self'” the painting becomes a chaotic container of sorts, into which conscious and subconscious forces are siphoned, in combinations riddled with irony and pathos (as a desperate attempt to produce emotion…). Yehezkelli's characteristic self portraits also have a deceptive nature, and rather than fixating self identity they are an expression of the dissolution of the identification of the “self”. The artist is an “entrepreneur of the self” (in the worlds of Svetlana Alpers). The multitude of self portraits (in the form of “self portrait as…”) expresses the game of changing masks, what marks the presence of the “act”, an “art occurrence” supposedly expropriated from the artist, an act that engenders a split of sorts between the portrait and the self that this portrait was supposed to transmit, and in fact embodies the dimension of failure to transmit the self that perhaps becomes “everyman” and at times “every Jew”…
This time, more than in the last exhibition, this carnivalesque art fair transgresses the boundaries of self that wallows in the pleasures of its despondency. From the introvert self to the world, to zeitgeist painting.
The works' titles do not “speak for themselves” but are a part of integrated art talk. Thus for instance, in the Monument for the Women of Shuja'iyya – a proposal for a monument of sorts, a woman lioness, an upside down IDF helmet that sprouts slivers of light, a noseless smiley, and another smiley that pops up in the layers of paint, winged like an angel of compassion from the top right, palm trees, Gaza-esque Guernicas (the junkyard of the global and Israeli history of art is not unknown to Yehezkelli). And next to it – The Picking of the Flowers – centralization in the hybrid figure and amorphous expansion into heaped chaos of signifiers that have multiple signifies: a bowed palm tree, a map that may also be a prayer shawl (Talit), a construction of an oriental landscape compressed in the left, a comb, an F bottle, and from the fauvist ground of amassed emoticons screams the death toll.
The two paintings of oriental sun, one happy and the other sad, imbue the exhibition space with a sort of atmospheric incense, suns which are eclipses, suns which are eyes, a watercolor pupil as a smiling face that will dissolve into an abstract stain in “sad sun”, where we find a happy palm tree … Onkelos from a bird's eye view that also resembles a palette, more than they exude life, these are disconcerting suns; the optimistic Platonist similitude between the sun and the eye, the metaphorical gaze at the sun as what leads to the purpose of the truth, a sublime step in the philosophical education ladder, is replaced by Georges Bataille who preaches to dare look at the anti-ideal, the dirty, with the blinding black sun, and like in the painting, the suns are also the eyeballs and the liquid is the tearing, the oozing, or the bleeding (this reoccurs in the painting Sunshine and Moisture and Self Portrait with Pogrom).
Pshat & Drash, drowners, a ship of fools, and a sail, a smiley wearing “a painter's hat”, a complicated hand, a floating piece of feces, a bird. An invitation to enter the “Pardes”.
(English translation: Maya Shimony)
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.
