Nadav Weissman | Riding Lesson
Solo Exhibition
Riding Lesson was also presented:
MUSAC, Leon, Spain, 2006
Asian Biennale, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2008
The installation was acquired for the collection of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.
The installation consists of paintings, sculptures, objects and two animation films.
Paintings: oil and charcoal on plywood. Sculptures-figures: polyester, fiberglass and pigment. Objects: fiberglass, polyester, metal, iron chains, PVC, wood, perspex, felt, lamp, paper, charcoal, paint, pigment. Dimensions variable.
The exhibition includes sculptures, paintings and two animated movies. In the exhibition, as a paraphrase on the Trojan horse, intruding under cover to the city of Troy and wining the war by surprise, Nadav Weissman stations an underground city in the Chelouche gallery, which covers with childish images and bright colors the potential for horror. Trucks laden with bones cross the “city’s” space, stables of dead horses, “Yossi & Sons” garage for fixing vehicles and broken hearts, as well as the four children of one family (three brothers and a sister), fashioned by the carpenter-artist, Nadav Weissman, wandering, lonely, in the space, as if they were seeking the shadows of their parents who deserted them and the verb “l-o-v-e.” The exhibition space contains five horses or horse-parts, among them the decapitated head sculpture of “father-horse” hung in the city square for all to see, as if it were a portrait image in memory of the Trojan father, featured in a frame and hung in the bourgeois living room. The other four horses, created after the image of the mythological “father-horse,” are present in the space as illusory potential.
The paintings hung on the walls in the familial “living room” mark endless cyclicality through the image of the fence as a type of memory or as an allusion to the perception of renaissance painting as a window to reality and the shadows falling on the cave walls, whose presence reflects a more lucid “truth.” The paintings depict the moon, the very same moon hanging in the Western skies across the sea. The horses, with the four siblings on their backs, seem to want to break free for the open expanses, toward the lost childhood memory, or to encircle the walls of that mythological city.
The riding lesson learnt in the exhibition is a metaphor for the confrontation of life and various dual relationships, and also for the difficulty of learning this lesson without parents or teachers to provide guidance.
