Martha Rieger: Oasis
 
“Oasis,” “bubble,” and “egg” are keywords in Martha Rieger’s site-specific installation for the spaces of the Trumpeldor Gallery in Beer Sheva. These three words serve as a sort of access codes to the installation’s visual, symbolic-cultural, emotional, and psychological contexts.
Comprised of eggs and bubbles made of ceramic (and other) materials, the installation creates a legendary or fantastic oasis, a fertilized and fertile site, within the gallery’s Ottoman building in the old city of Beer Sheva. The viewer’s movement becomes a journey in the space, in time, and in one’s inner world, accompanied by a feeling or a temporary state of aquatic flow in the desert gallery. It is a mirage, a fata morgana of humidity and efflorescence emerging from the arid soil. It is rather a fertile meeting between water, sky, sand and vegetation, which breathes into them symbolic, artistic life.
Egg images are common in human culture. Martha Rieger is aware of the many contexts and symbolic meanings of the egg and consciously refers and alludes to them in her work: Easter eggs, Columbus’ egg, the omphalos, the Phoenix egg, the Fabergé egg and eggs in general as a metaphor of the world’s genesis.
In Hebrew, the word bubble means, metaphorically, a self-enclosed world. Those living within it are unaware of the outside reality and of the bubble’s inherent fragility. In art history, water bubbles levitate in still life paintings of the vanitas genre as a metaphor for life’s ephemerality and emptiness.
The sand, porcelain, colors, sunlight, LED light bulbs, and dimness – together, all these components of Martha Rieger’s installation create an impressive view. The gallery’s rooms become a cabinet of curiosities, magical sites. The illusory moment is fleeting, like an egg about to burst or hatch. Prolonging the look and the stay inside the porcelain installation is tantamount to an attempt to freeze and immortalize this moment. Like an elephant in a porcelain shop, we need to move carefully so as not to shatter the art illusion and the artist’s fantasy.
Prof. Haim Maor, Curator

Martha Rieger was born in 1964 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 1983 - She move to Israel by herself. 1984 - She returned to Brazil to study art. 1986-1989 - she studied social work at Tel Aviv University. Since 1991, she began working in applied ceramics. The transition to art ceramics transpired in 2011 during her stay in Jingdezhen, China, as an artist in residence, where she was exposed to the traditional techniques of porcelain production and decoration. In the years 2014 and 2015, Rieger participated in the Fresh Paint Art Fair. 2016 – "Columbus’ Egg" exhibition (curated by Irena Gordon) at Inga Gallery in Tel Aviv; 2015-2016 - "From Iznik to Jerusalem" group exhibition (curated by Sharon Laor-Sirak and Dr. Dalia Manor) at the Museum of Islamic and Near Eastern Culture in Beer Sheva; 2016-2017 – "Post-Postmodernism ≠ Utopia" group exhibition (curated by Svetlana Reingold) at the Haifa Museum of Art. 2017-2018 - site-specific installation, "Oasis", (curated by Prof. Haim Maor) at the Trumpeldor Gallery in Beer Sheva. Martha Rieger lives and works in Tel Aviv

 

פתיחה חגיגית לתערוכת "מרתה ריגר: אואזיס" ב"גלריית טרומפלדור : מרכז אמנות", רחוב טרומפלדור 19 באר-שבע, הכניסה חופשית. מומלץ להצטייד בלבוש חם אוצר: פרופ' חיים מאור יום שני 2 בינואר 2018, בשעה 18:00