January 2023 Exhibitions
In the current exhibitions at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art there are three solo exhibitions: for the artists Aviva Uri, Ivan Schwebel and Rotem Amizur, in addition there is an extensive group exhibition, which inspired the entire lineup. Interlinking all exhibitions is a web of medial and conceptual internal contexts. They all tell the story of paper as a creative platform, and of the drawn line that retains the movement of the drawing action. That line is coming alive in the exhibition as an expression of dynamism, makes its voice heard through a dialogue with related creative fields: illustration, animation, and cinema.
Beyond Somewhere
In the sixties of the 20th century, were laid the foundations of the theory of the multiverse – the countless universe bubbles, each of which continues and develops independently of the bubbles surrounding it. The exhibition beyond somewhere seeks to examine the speculative potential inherent in scientific hypothesis in the light of the act of art. The seven works included in aim to challenge the laws of reality through acts of alienation and diversion, they encourage to look in a different way at close and distant images, to copy contents from one context to another and reassemble them – when they are a little foreign and a little familiar.
The exhibition also dictates a different walking route from the familiar one in the museum, with the intention of creating in the viewer a feeling of challenge and disorientation in order to recalibrate consciousness to a new state – above and beyond somewhere. The exhibition therefore invites visitors to look inside and outside with irony, humor, and skepticism, and to encounter the half-knowledge, the questions, and the fears, all lying at the basis of human existence.
Portrait Time II
The focus of the museum’s current group of exhibitions, like the previous one Portrait Time I, is on portraits, and their significance, and a central place is given to the painted portrait, which brings the human face to the canvas or the wooden panel. A recurrent theme in the exhibitions is a repeated return to a single painting subject, an act which is akin to a relentless attempt to capture on canvas the essence of a dialogical relationship between the painter and the subject.
According to the hierarchical artistic ranking prevalent until a century ago, the portrait was seen as an inferior genre compared to other types of painting. The contemporary view sees the portraiture as a complex genre that combines broad mental, social, and cultural perspectives, which can hold a mirror up to our own nature.
Portrait Time I
Portraiture – one of the classic genres in art, throws into sharp relief questions of identity and patterns of representation, as well as tensions between the personal expression and the social and period expression, and between the aspiration of perpetuation in material and our transitory human nature. In charcoal drawing and sand drawing and oil pastel, in photography and sculptural installation, the female artists tell personal stories such as migration, the withering of the body, deep mourning and a constant fear of death and the future. At the same time, the works turn the personal experience into a universally female experience, even universally human.
Scene of Events
The Scene of Events group of exhibitions at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art features nine solo exhibitions, each of which portrays the artist's in-depth observation of the site – the scene of the event. The term, which in our locales is associated with dramatic news events, detaches from its current public aspect, and becomes a personal act of research, of focusing on a single element as a parable or as an analogy for a continuous existential situation.
The nine exhibitions in the array are autonomous units with an internal validity expressed in both the medium and the content, yet both material and thematic connections are drawn between them. The scenes show traces of a past event or of an impending one, and thus allude to a diversity of temporalities and layers of memory: distant memories of a historical or mythical past, tangible present, and repressed memory. Using the camera or the sculptural element, the artists look soberly at the reality of our lives.
Trait pour trait: Portrait of the Museum
"Trait pour trait: Portrait of the Museum" seek to portray the museum itself through shows whose language is comprised of diverse kinds of reproduction and replication. The exhibitions on view explore the museal institution from diverse points of view, and elements of the museum’s display system are the objects they portray and question. The exhibitions maintain a complex relationship to the museum. It serves both as the depicted object and as the “screen” on which the museum’s image is to be portrayed, feature for feature, trait pour trait. The exhibitions present challenging, charged questions about the ways by which the museum is established as an institution, as well as about that institution’s order and its significance.
In Her Footsteps
The group of exhibitions at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art is comprised of eight shows by women artists. Six of them are projects by women artists and curators who present research journeys undertaken in the footsteps of real or fictional women from diverse times and places. The stories of the artists and the women who are the subject of their exploration have become bound together – these are women who create, act, love, despair, search relentlessly, inflict and sustain hurt; women who endeavor to tell their personal stories and convey their ideas, to pave their way despite the difficulties due to their gender.
The third show in the series “Inward Gaze,” which explores the architectural and conceptual structure of the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, is presented by the Mundi_Lab Group. The group, which holds a research workshop at the Technion’s Faculty of Architecture in Haifa, is hosted for three months by the museum.