At the heart of the portrait is the complex relationship that exists between the appearance of the human subject and its plastic representation. In his groundbreaking essay, The Mask and the Face, Ernst Gombrich – one of the leading scholars of art history – discusses the particular difficulty involved in producing artistic representations of the human face. In a portrait, he points out, artists are required not only to turn something alive into something inanimate and render a three-dimensional entity into a two-dimensional one, they must also contend with constant movement (facial expressions, physical and mental state) and signs of the passage of time, that constantly change the subject’s face. For this reason, Gombrich suggests, portraits embody a certain duality, being both a specific depiction of a particular person (a face), and a reflection of a fundamental human aspect of the current Zeitgeist and social roles (a mask).
Each of the current exhibitions tackles this duality in its own way. Thus, in Natalia Zourabova’s exhibition we can see not only the tracking of the changes that she and her daughter Ester undergo in their Jaffa apartment, but also a feminine take on the life of single-parent immigrant women seeking to redefine their self-determination and their own place in the world. Vered Aharonovitch’s kinetic sculpture, depicting herself and her family in a handsome home, offers a personal, revealing family portrait that reflects the difficulty of experiencing the present amidst a paralyzing fear of death and of the future. Veteran painter Hannah Levi, whose exhibition features paintings from her estate that have not yet been displayed in public, repeatedly painted portraits of women – herself and her friends – that highlight the signs of aging in their bodies and faces, in part through her choice of painting materials – often mixing in sand and oil-pastels to suggest the constant erosion of life and its fragility. Allison Zuckerman places her self-portraits within chimeric scenes crammed with references from the history of art, blithely demolishing formulaic representations of women in Western cultural history. Her portraits underscore the visual cornucopia of the digital age, with a nod to the selfie culture and the #MeToo protests. Maria Saleh Mahameed recounts, on a long scroll, her experiences of the past year, in which she was flung between life and death. As a native of the town of Umm el-Fahem (“Mother of Coal”), she repeatedly presents her image in charcoal, next to her hand- and footprints, as an existential statement: Ana Hoon (Arabic, “I am here”). Iris Nesher’s image projection is an elegy that presents her perspective, as a photographer and mother, on her son in various art venues, over many years. Collectively, the images provide a multilayered portrait of many periods and situations, in which our knowledge of the son’s eventual tragic death intersects with thoughts about the archetypal museum as a contemporaneous time capsule that preserves and commemorates the essence of what it is to be human.
The large hall presents Tsibi Geva’s exhibition, “Where I Come From.” The exhibits, containing something like a condensed index of his work over five decades, may be regarded, by extension, as an artistic self-portrait. Through the constituent parts of his artistic identity – stretching between Western culture and highly charged representations of localism, and between the legacy of his father, the European Modernist architect, and the “vernacular architecture” (local architecture without architects) that is at the focus of Geva’s work – the exhibition outlines an inner portrait that is also a portrayal of a certain place and time.
Dr. Aya Lurie
Director and Chief Curator
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