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 conceptual art in Israel, and Pistoletto, one of the most important artists in the world and the founders of Arte Povera, created an innovative and uncompromising artistic language that still influences many generations of artists.
The exhibition presents key works of the artists: Gechtman’s last monumental installation,” Lunching Apparatus ” from 2008, presents Qassam rockets that are supposed to launch his ideas and creations into the future, in front of Pistoletto’s ”Crown of Mirrors” work which deals with the everchanging dimensions of space and time. This exhibition is a fascinating glimpse into Gechtman and Pistoletto’s ongoing preoccupation with the relationship between the “low” and the “high,” source and image, natural and artificial, and their display modes. Blurring the boundaries between the actual gallery space behind the viewer and the virtual space inside the mirror creates a new meeting of the physical reality with the imagined one.
The entire exhibition deals with subverting reality and disrupting the viewer’s ability to see in a given space, between intellectual analysis and total art, and links questions related to the theory of being and the critical and political position of the work of art.
