Tel Aviv Museum of Art Opens Renewed Permanent Display

Tel Aviv Museum of Art is delighted to announce the launch of its new permanent display of the Israeli art collection entitled Material Imagination on 17 February 2022. The exhibition will include more than 120 works by leading artists, some well-known, others making their debut. The exhibition departs from the story of Israeli art as a chronological narrative running parallel to the national story.

Material Imagination is a model of thinking conceived by philosopher Gaston Bachelard during years of delving into the four elements—earth, air, water, and fire—and their incarnations in the imagination and in art. The material imagination thrives in the dialogue between the materials of the world and archaic images—archetypes accumulated and etched in human consciousness.

Israeli art and the national narrative are inextricably intertwined. Since its inception, Israeli art has been the visual expression of the old-new Hebrew culture, assigning the Zionist brushstroke a national role. One common thread, even among the many contradictory readings of art in Israel, regarded the work of art as an expression of Jewish and Israeli reality, with its ebbs and flows. There seemed to be a demand made of Israeli art, be it painting, sculpture, or photography, to say something—as if a capsule containing a verbal message lay within.

The Israeli collection exhibition, Material Imagination, is underlain by the desire to reinstate the work of art and the experience of viewing it to the physical and intuitive realms, in their deepest sense. Material Imagination is a model of thinking conceived by philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard in his study of the four elements: earth, air, water, and fire. The material imagination thrives in the dialogue between the materials of the world and archaic images—archetypes accumulated and etched in human consciousness. The model formulated by Bachelard is the organizing principle underpinning the current collection exhibition.

The three galleries of Israeli art unfold three chapters: Promised Land, Airship, and Blazing Movement. Each chapter examines the works through a host of associations arising in view of the artworks’ materials or elemental images.

Most of the works in the exhibition are from the collection of Tel Aviv Museum of Art—a treasure trove of art accumulated and preserved throughout the museum’s ninety years of existence. The breadth of the collection, with thousands of works in storage, sparked a quest for an alternative organizing principle, one that would transcend the preconditioned gaze and habitual categorization of Israeli art. A new principle whereby artworks, never before exhibited, can come to light.

The decision to adhere to the nature of the work of art, to its unique temperament, does not turn its back on the history of the place; often, it is precisely this choice that summons the political, religious, and national identities pulsating in this highly charged territory, which are recorded in the art created here.

At the heart of the exhibition is a gallery for temporary exhibitions of Israeli art, as part of the collection. The exhibitions in this gallery will turn the spotlight on a single artist, through the distillation of a monographic focus.

Promised Land

The identity of Israeli art was created as a proxy of place and the fruit of its soil: a territory devoid of fixed borders, a symbolic, sacred, anxiety-ridden space, infused with the sanctity of the land.

This chapter in the collection exhibition revisits the idea of the Promised Land and its soil with some called-for quandaries: What does the earth promise as a material element before it becomes a place of residence, an everlasting possession, or a site of conflict? The works in this gallery nestle in the beauty of solidity, in the layers of time washed over a single stone. They strive for the simple and unquestionable place of a material modeled by hand.

To wander through the gallery is to be surrounded by the two distinct movements associated with the soil: work and rest, the vertical and the horizontal. One will also sense the resistance of the hard material, familiar to anyone who has ever tried to chisel a stone or carve in wood. The disintegration of the earthy material particles in the encounter between earth, air, and water, will draw attention to the work of art’s ability to possess antithetical qualities: at once hard and tender, heavy and weightless.

The unique nature of the works formed from the materials of the land and its appearance are bound up with the qualities and powers unique to the earth, the soil: its ability to evoke dreams of conquest, the darkness of its depths, its crumbling clods that sprout life. Hovering over the earthy matter are broader questions associated with the place: both yearning and fleeing, possessing and being dispossessed in this Promised Land.

Airship

The selection of works in this gallery draws similarities between the two elusive elements—water and air—revealing their unique interplay on the stage of Israeli art, with air in the lead and water in a supporting role.

The scarce presence of the aquatic element in the museum’s collection of Israeli art is surprising, given the fact that Israel borders the sea. It is as if the material imagination of water is the polar opposite to earth as the destiny and destination of the Zionist narrative, a place of constant longing. By this view, the sea became nothing but space to be crossed to reach the coveted land; a medium whose crossing sheds homeland, culture, and past beliefs. It is not merely that there are relatively few representations of sea or lake in Israeli landscape paintings, but rather that the material essence of water remains conspicuously absent. Unlike the stable and tangible element of earth, the elements of water and air have a spiritual and physical malleability, which is antithetical to the prevalent narration of Israeli art as a single channel with branching tributaries.

This gallery emphasizes the verticality of the ascent to the heights and the descent into the abyss of the ocean. In some of the works there are duplications, echoing the primordial state of the work as a reflection.

The air surrounds the works or is imprisoned in them as a negative space, as a distance or a gap between hovering forms. The movement of air in the space—the act of breathing (Heb. neshima) and the soul (neshama)—touches on the idea of transcendence and on mystical experiences of sanctity.

Blazing Movement

In its material qualities, fire embodies a radical turning point, everything that transforms in a great blaze. It may exist as a hidden potential that conceals explosive charges, or as a great, unexpected force that erupts in fury. Its turbulent nature lies in the polarities transpiring within it: life and death, conflagration and a slow burning, gold and ash, light and darkness.

Israeli art speaks its declared and repressed manifestations in tongues of fire. The works in this space emerge as bodies of ideological, religious, artistic, and sexual fervor. They burn with a passion for destruction and regeneration, illuminating the work of art as an act of love in its most zealous moments. It seems as though the fuels of this land have flared up within the works, radiating their heated light outward. The chronic images of fire—from the smoke of war and bombardments to the burning pines of the Israeli forests, from the lighting of Shabbat candles and the torches of Independence Day to the sight of tires set ablaze in days of civic resistance—have become the nation’s eternal flame.

The fundamental questions at the core of Jewish consciousness—exile and redemption, messianism and destruction—are enmeshed in the gallery as in the dream regarding the establishment of a national, modern. and secular art.

Fire introduces the flame of past heritage, everything that continues to burn despite attempts to extinguish it: the memory of the Holocaust, of Mizrahi identity, tradition, and Judaism.

Artist List – Material Imagination

Etti Abergel, Larry Abramson, Walid Abu Shakra, Zvi Aldouby, Alima, Dalia Amotz, Arie Aroch, Alize Auerbach, Shmuel Bak, Micha Bar-Am, Ido Bar-El, Joav BarEl, Adina Bar-On, Arnon Ben-David, Eitan Ben Moshe, Asaf Ben-Zvi, Deganit Berest, Adam Berg, “Bezalel”, Naftali Bezem, Joshua (Shuky) Borkovsky, Yossi Breger, Bella Brisel, Joseph Budko, Yael Burstein, Miriam Cabessa, Moshe Castel, Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi, Chen Cohen, Mirit Cohen, Pinchas Cohen Gan, Nurit David, Maayan Elyakim, Leon Engelsberg, Käthe Ephraim Marcus, Bianca Eshel-Gershuni, Bracha L. Ettinger, Eliyahu Fatal, Yair Garbuz, Eliyahu Gat, Moshe Gat, Gideon Gechtman, Moshe Gershuni, Tsibi Geva, David Ginton, Michael Gitlin, Yitzhak Golombek, Michael Grobman, Michael Gross, Yehoshua Grossbard, Nahum Gutman, Joseph Halevy, Emanuel Hatzofe, Shoshana Heimann, Michal Helfman, Irit Hemmo, Samuel Hirszenberg, Eti Jacobi, Uri Katzenstein, Chaim Kiewe, Yehiel Krize, Raffi Lavie, Helmar Lerski, Yudith Levin, Batia Lichansky, Ella Littwitz, Pinchas Litvinovsky, Maryan, Moshe Matusowski, Abraham Melnikov, Jacob Mishori, Michal Na’aman, Efrat Natan, Joshua Neustein, Lea Nikel, Moshe Ninio, Nora and Naomi, Ibrahim Nubani, Avshalom Okashi, Chana Orloff, Mordecai Pitkin, Sigal Primor, Ze’ev Raban, Gilad Ratman, David Reeb, Reuven Rubin, Avi Sabah, Maria Saleh Mahameed, Porat Salomon, Hadas Satt, Shmuel Schlesinger, Ruth Schloss, Benno Schotz, Fatma Shanan, Rachel Shavit, Henry Shelesnyak, Yehiel Shemi, Michael Sgan Cohen, Pesach Slabosky, Sultana Souroujon, Jakob Steinhardt, Moshe Sternschuss, Sionah Tagger, Naama Tsabar, Igael Tumarkin, Aviva Uri, Gal Weinstein, Ruth Dorrit Yacoby, Shahar Yahalom, Yosef Zaritsky, Ben Zion