Art Shows > Views / Shulamit Near
Views / Shulamit Near /22/12/2018 to - 22/12/2018 Avda'a Gallery in Kfar Yassif hosts the painter Shulamit Nir for a solo exhibition: 'Mirrors' Where you will present drawings and drawings. Portraits, still life and landscapes. Expanded text about the exhibition: What does landscape want? My first tentative answer will be: To be loved, the landscape wants to seduce us, to embrace us, to pull us into the bosom of unbounded belonging. " (Abramson, 2009: 111). So the artist asks and answers Larry Abramson in the end to WJ Mitchell's Holy Landscape. We feel the need to be close to the landscape, to feel its reality, to belong to it. Affiliation is also possible metaphorically when the landscape we observe becomes an artistic representation. However, belonging to the landscape is never free of cultural structures. In the relationship between man and the landscape, Abramson agrees with Mitchell, there is no room for innocence. The landscape is socialized by all the mechanisms that build it as a homeland and disguise their tricks by presenting it as "natural." So "natural" that our fascination with the landscape is blind, policed by national ideologies that define what Mitchell calls an "imperial landscape" (Mitchell, 2009: 24). Thoughts on landscape paintings in Shulamit Nir's exhibition Mirrors, December, December 2017 Gallery of Art and Design Dr. Shahar Marinin-Distelfeld How, in the light of Mitchell's critique, can we explain the landscape paintings of Shulamit Nir? Will the palm trees and the houses of the village in Dahab, Sinai, have an Orientalist meaning? Will the Jerusalem panorama be called a "visionary regime" that denies the historical-political complexity of Jerusalem and seeks to "build the gaze and control the consciousness," as Abramson defines the contribution of the lyrical abstract in Israeli art to the construction of the landscape? It seems that Shulamit Nir challenges this critical theory by proposing a modest and lyrical version of the landscape. Nir tells "little stories," as she puts it; A branch of a tree shines on a house, tops and antennae lean on a roof, and alongside them are "sagas" or large-scale landscape paintings that resonate in their full splendor with the familiar Western landscape art genre. The combination of close and unambiguous landscapes alongside spectacular and open classical landscapes, such as Jerusalem or Sinai, proves to us that Nir's interest in the landscape is what can be carefully, but courageously, defined as "innocence." This innocence does not negate the emotional baggage of the familiar domestic landscape, as well as of distant landscapes, in which the landscape is seen as an aesthetic object (a position against which neo-Marxist theorists claimed that the landscape is always a "class view"). Mitchell, in later versions of his philosophy, greatly softened his position, arguing that "the landscape exerts subtle force on people and brings out a wide range of emotions and meanings that will make it difficult to characterize and define them" (Abramson, 2009: 119). The meaning of the landscape in Nir's paintings lies in the aesthetic quest. Nir grew up in the realistic painting school, and was a student of Israel Hishberg. She would always look for a place with a view, a place to look at. That's the starting point, that's when the painting was born. From here begins a journey combining exterior and interior, meticulous planning of the picturesque space on the canvas and intuitive color gamers. These two elements define Nir's handwriting and transform her paintings into compositions that seek harmony and beauty. The paintings of Nir, a resident of Beit HaEmek, allow a refreshing breeze that offers astonishment from a familiar local landscape that she shares with her neighbors, the Arabs of the Western Galilee and Kfar Yasif, who host her for this exhibition. Much has been written about the marginalization of the genre of landscape paintings in Israeli art in recent decades. Mitchell's assumption that the landscape is never innocent seems to have been reinforced in Israeli culture. Terms such as "the redemption of the land" and "conquest of the wilderness" whose visual expressions we have known in Zionist art at the beginning of the 20th century have decreed the fate of the Israeli landscape for eternal politicization. The landscape of the artists of the Eretz Israel school was defined as Orientalist, and the abstract landscape of New Horizons was defined as expressing colonialist blindness. From the 1960s, landscape painting was pushed into a corner, and when he returned in the 1980s and 1990s, it was a landscape that was not based on the idea of metaphysical metaphysical nature but on what Gideon Ephrat calls "the sublime nature" hostile to man , Alienated from Zionist concepts that so fascinated his creators in the past (Ophrat, 2004: 32). It seems that the Jewish-Palestinian conflict has corrupted all of us, Jews and Arabs, the natural ability to be overwhelmed by the landscape around us, and as a result the idea of the unattainable nature has disappeared, the "natural order" that the romantic artist is trying to capture with his brush. Palestinian artists paint a forgotten and abandoned childhood landscape, and Jewish artists deconstruct the mythological landscape out of guilt and offer imaginary and apocalyptic landscape versions. Is it possible to observe the local landscape in a non-sacred way (in a paraphrase of Mitchell)? Is it possible that we are now experiencing a hesitant return to a positive attitude towards the landscape? In this exhibition Nir Nir offers a non-sacred view in the broadest sense of expression. The familiar, domestic landscape, as well as the iconic view of Jerusalem of gold, are not elevated to holiness and do not become "paganism," as Mitchell suggests, referring to the art of representing the landscape. If the Jerusalem landscape is iconic or holy it will be in the aesthetic sense only. The series of Jerusalem paintings, from which only a few examples are presented in this exhibition, expresses an attempt to give a picturesque, almost pastoral sanctity to the golden city, without linking it to the bonds of history. What appears to be a realistic painting at first glance turns out to be a laborious work that combines structural structures on the one hand, and precision in the design of details on the other. Nir shapes the space in a harmonious way, based on mathematical design inspired by Renaissance artists. Unlike the pre-painted compositions on canvas, color work is intuitive and unplanned. The vast variety of colors spread evenly on the canvas, placed in small patches, gives the work a Renaissance atmosphere that makes it more beautiful. The work of color ranges from large, flat or airy spots to delicate brushwork of tiny details that give the painting a sense of materiality. The colors are strong, bright in the sunlight, not apologizing. The landscape paintings were mostly drawn from a certain point, which Nir returned day after day for a period. This is to achieve the desired lighting at the same time and in the same season. The place from which the view is visible, whether it is Jerusalem, Haifa or the Kibbutz dining room, also becomes significant in the creative process. Many of the paintings continue to be born in the studio; A tree that interferes with the composition is omitted, a path is added to the houses, the green of the grass sharpens to a phosphorescent hue. In the studio there are added patches of shade in different shades of color and signs of life that were not actually there. The picturesque landscape looks familiar but also dreamy. There are no daily human occurrences in it, and we can not see a rickety or abandoned road. The landscape is free of conflicts and identities, yet it is very authentic. It is clear to every local eye that this is a local landscape. Nir's landscape wants to be a space that allows hope. A look at the exhibition reveals that the choice to paint a harmonious, beautiful landscape is a political choice: to refuse to politicize the landscape. To satisfy the Arab and Jewish audience that arrives at the gallery, I will see a moment of admiration from a refreshing, perhaps even optimistic, look we have already forgotten. Sources:
location - ליד המרכז הקהילתי, כפר יאסיף Time - 22/12/2018 to - 22/12/2018 Exhibition opening - 12/02/2019, שעה - 16:00 שיח גלריה יתקיים ביום שבת 26.1.19 , בשעה 16:00 |
The content appearing on this page and the details of this exhibition are shown on the behalf of the advertisers and on their responsibility.
All rights reserved to - artbeat.co.il © Israel Art
|1|