Gideon Gechtman and Tomer Sapir at the exhibition Groundwork

Sommer Gallery, Tel Aviv
Curator : Avi Lubin
Opening: 22.12.2011, 8:00 pm

Gideon Gechtman, Preperation sketch for Launching Apparatus, 2008

Avi Lubin, from the exhibition’s text:

The studio is a type of liminal space that enables detachment from ordinary time and place. It allows the artist to examine fundamental concepts and challenge them. The presentation of works in progress, or groundwork, provides a way to peer into the working methods of the artists including what changes occur, what they choose to leave out, and the evolution of the work. It exposes the subconscious of the finished work.
The research and the sketch receive special meaning when they are presented before a finished product exists. At this stage, the presentation reverses the hierarchy of relations between process and the final image.
Art is not a linear process with its peak visible at the end product. Tomer Sapir accumulated sketches, sculptures and objects in his studio and only when those were presented at the Haifa Museum as a single work made out of a system of vitrines and given a name Research for the Full Crypto- taxidermical Index, was it possible to think of the process of how the work developed and not as an arbitrary collection of sketches.
The “Do it Yourself” sketches by Gideon Gechtman from the exhibition Launching Apparatus make it hard to speak about such dual divisions as between research and product or process and peak. Even though the preparatory directions were made after the work was actually produced, the manner of presentation in the exhibition did not answer the question, ‘what came before what”- the sketches or the artwork? What appeared as systematic directions for the preparation of Gechtman’s works fulfills a different role and raises a question about the meaning of relationships between artworks and their creational processes.