Uri Lifshitz | Flesh and Blood

Curators: Aya Lurie, Ori Drumer

May 28, 2016 - Sep. 3, 2016

Uri Lifshitz (1936-2011), a virtuoso who engaged in painting, sculpture, etching, collage, and drawing, is one of the most prominent and talented artists to have worked in Israel. He is also one of the most controversial. The exhibition title points to an artistic and biographical study of Lifshitz; an exploration of the human figure in his work; and a consideration of both in a cultural and social context. For six decades, starting in the 1960s, Lifshitz produced an extensive, varied, challenging body of work. Taking part in central landmarks of Israeli art and culture,he participated in the last New Horizons exhibition with the group of young artists who presented new tendencies in art, including Moshe Kupferman, Raffi Lavie, and Igael Tumarkin; was a member of the avantgarde 10+ Group; was represented by Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv; represented Israel at the 1969 São Paulo Biennale; and exhibited in museums in New York, Brussels, London,Amsterdam, and others. Lifshitz’s name was familiar beyond the professional circles of visual art. He was the Sabra, the kibbutznik,the army parachutist who participated in the Battle of the Mitle during the 1956 Sinai War. He was part of Tel Aviv’s bohemian society and frequented Café Kassit, was often mentioned in society columns, and was connected to members of the military and business elite.

Revisiting the “Lifshitz case” is not only an artistic challenge but also raises broader cultural, social, and ethical questions. Both his life and his work were informed by conceptual gaps and problematic issues related to identity politics and accepted modes of expression, as well as to changing perceptions of the artist’s status in Israeli society. Lifshitz’s complex behavior throughout his life reveals him to be a charismatic, talented, dominant, egocentric artist who was also a rejected anti-hero, an unbridled provocateur, a tongue-lashing and belligerent chauvinistic drunk, uncouth and full of charm. In the last decade of his life, although he continued to produce works and exhibit as energetically as ever, Lifshitz was responsible in no small measure for his own relegation to the sidelines of the Israeli art scene. He alienated museum personages and artistic patrons, as well as the central cultural figures with whom he had been associated in the past. An interview he gave to Haaretz in 1998 sealed his own downfall with a series of disparaging, discriminatory, inflammatory statements, which resulted in waves of protest against him. The storm he stirred up did not abate, despite his apology. He was cut off from the public arena and isolated. More than an expression of an outlook or ideology, Lifshitz’s scathing tongue-lashings were a way of externalizing his own otherness, a means of removing himself from society as an enfant terrible, leaving him, over and over again, rejected by his social, professional, and economic reference groups, removed from the warm hug of the consensus. One may see it as an irrepressible self-destructive mechanism, which he finally took too far, to a point of no return. The current exhibition, marking five years to Lifshitz’s death, endeavors to explore recurrent themes in his work, most importantly the grotesque human figure, its existential cry and its silencing. It is a figure tormented body and soul, filled with a sense of self-sacrifice and fear of death, always situated in an arena of violence, struggle, and defiance against figures of authority and ureaucratic or state apparatuses. This figure’s existential state is one of constant crisis, analogous to social, economic, and ethical conditions. The works reiterate dissonance, physical and mental conflict, and a constant struggle for self-definition and identity. In this, they also resonate with the ways in which Israeli cultural and social selfperception has taken form.