"Broken Fields"

Israeli Art from the Doron Sebbag Art Collection, ORS Ltd

The exhibition "Broken Fields" brings together works by Israeli artists from the Doron Sebbag Art Collection, ORS Ltd, which—in the spirit of the time—express a rift, a wound, a disruption or interruption, mainly with regard to the local landscape. Although they represent different decades of Israeli art and artists of different generations, the works combine into a cohesive fabric, which also captures the current moment, attesting to the ongoing engagement of local artists with the constantly changing, ruptured terrain of the Israeli space and with the seeds of disaster planted therein.

          The selection on view also spans abstract works, which convey the idea of fracture or disruption symbolically, from 1970s conceptual works which surrender traces of action, such as walking the viewer through the stages of digging a hole in the ground and the mound of earth piled up next to it (Micha Ullman, 1977), or a direct, material tear, almost painful in its simplicity, that cuts a square of paper into two black masses (Michael Gitlin, 1974). Two works by Dalia Amotz represent the transition in her oeuvre from magnificent landscape photographs to ones that direct a critical gaze at the harsh Israeli reality; one depicts the Arava road cutting through the virginal landscape (1975), and the other portrays a field of thistles scorched by the blazing, almost violent Israeli sunlight, which blinds the eye and burns the photographic film (1984).

          Later works, from the 1990s, and even more explicitly from the early 2000s, offer a direct and critical gaze at the charged local scenery, sketching a landscape scarred by construction and excavations, in which various disturbances are inserted, and forceful, invasive elements emerge alongside signs of desertion or disappearance. An abandoned building, sealed and devoid of openings, reminiscent of a child's representation of an archetypal house, dissolves and fades into the landscape (Michal Rovner, 1990); row after row of uniform stone houses with few windows gnaw away at the mountainside, virtually blind to the landscape in which they are planted—the material products of an overall economic and political settlement policy (Efrat Shvili, 1992-98); an ominous cloud of smoke swirls over a desolate landscape (Avner Ben Gal, 2004); a tall wall flanked by a towering pillar testify to the construction of the Separation Barrier between Israel and the West Bank and the deepening of the split between these spaces (Miki Kratsman, 2006). In the most recent work in the exhibition, a cypress tree—an expression of sadness and mourning in Israeli art—takes its place in the foreground, turning into a dark scar that splits a blood-red landscape, in which an endless procession of people continues to walk (Michal Rovner, 2013).

Ravit Harari

Artists: Dalia Amotz, Avner Ben Gal, Michael Gitlin, Sharon Glazberg, Miki
Kratsman, Roee Rosen, Michal Rovner, Efrat Shvili, Micha Ullman, Sharon

Yaari

Curator: Ravit Harari

Collection manager: Tami Gilat

•  17:00 opening and audience reception

• The exhibition will be open to the general public on all days of the festival, with free entry