Two exhibitions by Israeli artists recently opened in Venice, Italy and a third will open in Torino Tuesday. Ilit Azoulay is showing Queendom at the Israeli Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Ronit Keret presents Personal Structures 2022 at the Palazzo Mora there. Zavi Apfelbaum’s exhibition Light. Life. Land opens May 3 in Torino at Teatro Paesana.
What do these three different Israeli artists bring to Italy, a country so artistically rich?
For Queendom, Azoulay explores the rich Islamic art collection created by Prof. David Storm Rice and donated to the Museum of Islamic Art in Jerusalem following his death in 1962. The Islamic Middle Ages metal vessels, with their refined details and figures, are enhanced, blown-up in size, taken apart and reconstructed under an ultramarine canopy. Offering an imaginative new way to read Western attitudes to Islamic civilization.
Curated by Shelley Harten, the exhibition seems to be a natural meeting point between artist and curator. Due to Harten’s previous interest in how the orient and Arab culture was represented in Zionist and Israeli-produced visual art and Azoulay’s deep involvement in detailed historical research, which produces large-scale photomontages. These, in turn, challenge a linear reading of history. There is no one perspective from which to view the object, more than one frame to see the world through. A reconfiguration of the patriarchy, she offers, is possible.
For her Fake Walls series, Azoulay took an interest in how hastily-built walls erected in south Tel Aviv in the early years of the state were filled with fish bones and even belt buckles. Her works showed not just the now crumbling walls, but also the recovered junk items, to demonstrate this forgery of homes actually took place.
“Nobody admits to having fake walls,” she told Dana Gilerman in 2014 for Calcalist, “You can see that even back then, we [Israelis] had a faulty appreciation of what will happen the next day.”
In this country, “we paint inside the bagel hole,” Naftali Bezem told Ron Maiberg in 1986 for Monitin. He also told Maiberg how to solve this problem. Build one half of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and use the money ear-marked for the other half to purchase “one good Goya painting.”
Israeli artists, brought up in a country that has plenty of crumbling walls and collapsing wedding halls, but few original Goya or Velázquez paintings, saw themselves as destined to wrestle the powerful angel of Western visual culture and almost never win.
Even artists who make the pilgrimage to Italy to undergo the difficult training needed to work in marble, like Zohar Gotesman, produce works that function within our very specific “bagel hole.” Gotesman’s 2016 lime stone work Here Lay the Bones of Boris Shatz’s Peacock is brilliant because it connects to a local art-myth, the pet peacock the founder of the Bezalel Art Academy had, using an artistic language master-sculptor Antonio Canova himself could appreciate.
Italian art curator Ermanno Tedeschi, who maintained a gallery here and was the first to bring Menashe Kadishman and Gal Weinstein to Italy, disagrees.
“The quality of work produced by Israeli artists is high,” he maintains, “it is important Israel has many museums where it would be possible to show many different works.”
Tedeschi, who served as the head of the Tel Aviv Art Museum Friends Association, believes Israeli art is “an important ambassador of Israel to the world.”
In Personal Structures, Ronit Keret explores the melting of glaciers and the environmental disasters expected during an age of global warming in a large installation that combines sound and video art.
In an interview she gave last year to Portfolio, Keret told Maya Or it was seeing the Perito Moreno Glacier in Argentina with her own eyes that made her embark on this path. “One morning I woke up with a strong feeling I must protect it and save it,” she said, “by keeping a record of it.”
“Polystyrene,” she added, “seemed like a suitable material.”
The usage of the white material, which seems clean and pure, but is in fact an industrial side-product of the same tremendous people-driven trend that slowly boils the oceans and makes human survival much less likely – lends her work an elegiac quality. Keret often employs the visual of a black horse falling off a cliff as a lament to a natural world diminishing within our lifetime.
ZAVI APFELBAUM, in that sense, stands out. She does not deal with the Anthropocene epoch, nor does she create complex and detailed critiques of modernity. In Light. Life. Land the US-born artist offers Dead Sea sunsets and fields after rain.
This type of painting, which brings to mind the long gone Land of Israel school with its artists, among them Siona Tagger and Israel Paldi, is nice to point at when searching for a facile example of what is really Israeli art.
It is the fierce light, the Jewish faces, the biblical landscapes. Alexander Bogen, for example, described his joy at climbing Mount Meron and “seeing the Sea of Galilee as if it was a paint spot on my palm,” Ofer Aderet reported in Haaretz.
While Apfelbaum lacks the emotional force of these painters, she is a skilled artist, and her works offer rich and detailed scenes of Israeli life. Italians may not need Israeli talents to explore the calamities humanity faces, a visit to Pompeii will do that for bus fair and change, but there is something special about just being what you are. Another land where lemons grow, true, but also lime and did we mention Yuzu?
Curated by Tedeschi, this is but a starter to a much larger group exhibition, The Israeli Landscapes exhibition, to open at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce, Genoa on May 10. Co-curated by Tedeschi and Vera Pilpol, who also curated Keret in the Venice exhibition, the exhibition will include works by Fatma Shanan, Zoya Cherkassky Nnadi and Shai Azoulay, as well as Apfelbaum.
Due to the changes in the art market, which has become a lot more digital in recent years, Tedeschi closed all his galleries in 2014.
“I thought I would work less,” he sighs, “but, I ended up working twice as hard as a curator.”
Queendom by Ilit Azoulay will be shown at La Biennale di Venezia 2022 until November 27.
Personal Structures by Ronit Keret will be shown until the same date at the Palazzo Mora in Venice.
Light. Life. Land. by Zavi Apfelbaum will open on Tuesday May 3 at Teatro Paesana in Torino.
The Israeli Landscapes exhibition will open at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce, Genoa on May 10.
The last exhibition would not have been possible without the support of the Italian Embassy in Israel and the Israeli Embassy in Italy.