Nadav Weissman // Moshe Kupferman – Duo exhibition

In Hebrew

The exhibition seeks to examine the moment when a line ceases to be a line and becomes a thing, and the reverse moment, in which material, despite its physical presence, reverts to behaving like a painting.
As one of the central and influential artists in Israeli art of the second half of the twentieth century, Moshe Kupferman is identified above all with painting as an ongoing process of constructing depth and pictorial space through layers, surfaces, and stripes. Layers that emerge between surfaces, between bands, and through varying degrees of paint dilution. Kupferman created a form of painting that does not seek to represent an external world, but instead transforms the very act of painting into traces of time and actions that have taken place upon the surface. For him, painting is not a finished image but an open system, in which the past remains present within the present. The line exists simultaneously as a mark and as a plan for an action, as well as a spontaneous drawing within the painting. Even when it appears simple or minimal, it carries within it the history of the work and the possibility of what has been erased, covered, or left beyond the field of vision.
In recent years, Nadav Weisman has begun, alongside his work on other projects, to engage with Kupferman’s work. Weisman’s works are reliefs created through line, plane, material, and space, until the line leaves the surface and becomes an object. In his wall sculptures, the line acquires depth and weight. It is constructed, separated from the plane, and reassembled to create volume and three-dimensionality. What exists as a mark in Kupferman’s work becomes material in Weisman’s; what was a painterly action becomes a tangible physical action.
In this sense, Weissman does not seek to translate Kupferman or reproduce his visual language, but rather to examine what happens when one of its fundamental elements leaves the painting. The line becomes a cut, the cut opens up a space, and the space becomes an integral part of the work. A transition thus occurs from the trace of an action to a material action physically present in space.
While Kupferman does not seek to represent an external world, Weissman’s world is one of image, body, and landscape. In Weissman’s work, the frame of the painting dissolves in favor of the organic and geometric forms of landscape, stairs, and a pinwheel. When Weisman engages with Kupferman’s ideas in his work, Kupferman’s paintings become figures and forms within the world. For Weissman, through the very act of looking at Kupferman’s paintings, painting becomes an image in reality; and through this imagistic interpretation, an invitation to associative imagination emerges.
The works are installed alongside one another without a division between the two bodies of work. This creates a space in which line, layer, cut, and interval move from one work to another, refusing to remain exclusive to either artist. Kupferman’s works on paper and Weissman’s wall sculptures exist within the same field, allowing the eye to move between them and recognize parallels, gaps, and shifts.
This is a dialogue between two generations and between two conceptions of artistic action: for Kupferman, painting is a process in which time settles into material, for Weissman, material itself becomes a means of bringing painting into space. One leaves the traces of action upon the surface; the other transforms action into structure. Between line and material, painting and sculpture meet at the point where the boundary between them begins to fracture.