Herzliya Museum, founded on a collection of old paintings donated by Herzliya resident Eugene da Villa in the early 1960s, was originally located in an apartment on 15 Bar Ilan Street in the city. The museum’s current residence, designed in the Brutalist style by another Herzliya resident, Yaakov Rechter (together with Moshe Zarchi and Micha Peri), was opened to the public in 1975.2
It was built as a combination between a commemorative building (Beth Yad Labanim) and a museum and cultural center.3 The modern museum building, which recalls a fortress or bomb shelter, is characterized by formal and conceptual gravity and modesty. Noa Zait’s 1998 photograph captures an ordinary moment in the museum’s routine. The bags of school children who have just started a guided tour are heaped in the corner of the frame, waiting for their owners. Until 2000, the entrance to the museum was through Beth Yad Labanim, and this is where the photograph was taken.
In 2000, the museum was re-inaugurated after having been remodeled and enlarged by architects Yaakov Rechter and his son Amnon Rechter (the remodeling also included a separate entrance to the museum, setting it apart from the commemorative part of the building). It was redefined as a museum whose focus was on young, contemporary art, both Israeli and international. Rotem Balva’s video Rolling,filmed in 2002, was originally screened on monitors placed at various locations around the museum.4 The film shows the artist rolling through the renewed museum’s empty galleries. In an e-mail exchange, Balva explains, “Action transpires just prior to identity or physiological, historical, or sociological context. The original display of the video traced an action which took place in the museum’s empty spaces. It was shown at the spots where the camera was positioned while I was rolling around. The work was screened on eight monitors, which were placed on the floor, and the viewer saw different parts of the action while wandering through the museum. The viewer’s movement around the museum connected these fragments to the circuitous route of my own rolling.” In this way, the artist’s action traced the architectural circulation route through the renewed museum, connecting its historical and contemporary parts while reproducing the viewer’s own route. Her performative act declares the up-to-date, contemporary artistic language of the venue while affirming, through a Sisyphean act that involves physical and mental aspects, the key part she plays in it as an artist.
In 2008, Shibetz Cohen produced, inside the museum building, his introverted, solemn graphite works, Beth Yad Labanim, Herzliya Museum. The artist pressed white cardboard sheets to the building’s exposed-concrete walls and copied their unique texture onto the paper by repeatedly tracing it with graphite. Exposed concrete was one of the original building’s key features, which the architects preserved in the remodeling. They used it not only in the building’s outer envelope, but also as an architectural element and statement of values within the white cubes of the galleries.5 A large, dominant concrete wall, about twenty meters long, was built in the building’s new entrance hall. Exposed concrete was a key feature of Brutalism – a modern architectural style prevalent in post- WWII Europe, engaged in rebuilding its ruins, until the early 1970s.6 Brutalist construction was quick, industrialized, functional, relatively inexpensive, and devoid of any ornamental excess. It advocated exposure of building materials and methods as a form of expression both ethical and aesthetic. Israeli architects who adopted Brutalist notions during the same period endeavored to use it as an expression of the unique local identity of the State of Israel at a time of national struggle and hardship. At the time, concrete was associated to a great extent with the local modernist ethos and ideology. It was regarded as expressive of the essential characteristics of Israeli society, such as informal directness, pragmatism, resourcefulness and non-religiousness. Greatly appreciated, it was equally criticized as stressing qualities such as aggressiveness, erasure of differences, superficiality and disengagement with tradition and the past.
Irit Tamari’s Screensaver, which provided the impetus for this exhibition, was created as a site-specific installation. She meticulously photographed the concrete wall at the museum’s entrance and then printed its segments, one by one, at a 1:1 scale. She cut these prints and reattached them, creating a curtain of many folds, with which she covered the photographed wall. A line of light shows beneath the “curtain,” as if it were covering a window. This work not only refers to the iconic significance of the concrete wall in the architectural and museal context, but also to the very notion of artistic representation – that is, the signified-signifier relationship that underpins any work of art and the manifold relation it bears to reality.
The work evokes phantoms such as Jorge Luis Borges’ cartographer, who charted a map of the empire that was so detailed that it was on the same scale as the empire itself and covered it entirely; Alberti’s illusory Renaissance window, likening his ideal notion of painting to a landscape so realistically rendered that the viewers mistaken it for an actual window on the world; and Pliny the Elder’s familiar story of the painting competition and the curtain.
According to Pliny the Elder, in a painting contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius to determine the greater artist, the former depicted grapes so realistically that birds flew down to peck at them. In response, Parrhasius invited him to see his own painting. Proud of his success, Zeuxis reached out to pull aside the curtain from the painting, but the curtain itself turned out to be the image painted. Realizing his mistake, Zeuxis declared Parrhasius the winner, saying,”I have deceived the birds, but Parrhasius has deceived Zeuxis.”7 Tamari’s work introduces into this artistic equation the internal discourse of photography, raising – as do the works by Rotem Balva and Shibetz Cohen on view alongside it – questions about artistic representation itself. The work’s title, Screensaver, taken from the digital context, raises further questions about present-day distance between the illusory and the real, and between image and matter.

Rotem Balva, born 1969 in Eilat; Lives and works in Tel Aviv.
Shibetz Cohen, born 1967 in Rehovot; Lives and works in Tel Aviv and Bratislava, Slovakia.
Irit Tamari, born 1967 on Kibbutz Tzora; Lives and works in Tel Aviv.
Noa Zait, born 1967 on Kibbutz Merhavia; Lives and works in Tel Aviv.

[1 ]    This exhibition was greatly inspired by Brian O’Doherty’s foundational text,  Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
[2]     Zvi Efrat, The Israeli Project: Building and Architecture, 1948-1973 (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2001) (Hebrew).
[3]     Ruti Direktor, “Herzliya Museum as a Parable,” in Osnat Rechter (ed.), Yaakov Rechter: Architect  (Herzliya: Herzliya Museum of Art;
[4] The work was part of the group exhibition, “Inner Sanctum,” 2002, curated by Efrat Livny.[5] Gideon Ofrat, “Permeating Reinforced Concrete,” in Rechter, Yaakov Rechter: Architect, pp. 14 -25 (Hebrew).
[6] See Brutalist Architecture, a blog founded by Dr. Hadas Shadar and Architect Omri Oz, 2012, at . brutalist-architecture.org.
[7] Pliny the Elder, The Natural History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 330.

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