Moshe Gershuni facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Moshe Gershuni
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Moshe Gershuni, 2007
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| Born | 11 September 1936 |
| Died | 22 January 2017 (aged 80) Tel Aviv, Israel
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| Nationality | Israeli |
| Education | Avni Institute of Art and Design, Tel Aviv |
| Known for | Painting |
| Movement | Israeli art |
Moshe Gershuni (11 September 1936 – 22 January 2017) was an Israeli painter and sculptor. In his works, particularly in his paintings from the 1980s, he expressed a position different from the norm, commemorating The Holocaust in Israeli art.
Biography
Moshe Gershuni was born in 1936 to Yona and Zvi Kutner, who had migrated to British Mandate Palestine from Poland. Zvi, the head of the family, who was an agronomist and farmer, "hebraicized" the family name from Kutner to Gershuni, after his father. His mother Yona, née Senior, acted in community theater in Poland and made hats in Tel Aviv. The family lived in Tel Aviv on Hahashmal Street, and in 1939 moved to Mazeh Street. In 1938 Mira, Moshe's sister, was born, and in 1943, his brother Avshalom was born. Moshe was sent to the religious Bilu School and then continued his studies in a religious high school.
His father managed to save several family members from The Holocaust by arranging immigration certificates (certifikatim) to British Mandate Palestine, but some of his mother's relatives were murdered in the Holocaust. Gershuni described in a late interview the presence of the Holocaust in his childhood: "My mother was troubled all the rest of her life that she had not succeeded in bringing them here. And, like many others, I remember the years after the war [...] I remember that I read everything I could on the subject, there were already personal accounts of it on the radio, in private conversations, from the relatives who arrived. [...] it was in my consciousness, it was almost the center of my consciousness, in spite of the fact that my early years included the founding of the State and the war with the Arabs, but everything was a function of that experience."
In 1952 the family moved from Tel Aviv to Herzliya, near to the family-owned orchards, in the Gan Rashal area. In 1954, Gershuni's induction into the army was postponed by half a year because he was underweight, but the date of induction in 1955 was also postponed by the death of his father in an auto accident. Gershuni took over his father's job in the orchards. After his father's death Gershuni began to move into the world of art. The painter Leon Fouturian and the sculptor Uri Shoshany, both residents of Herzliya, influenced him. From 1960 to 1964 he studied sculpture in night courses at Avni Institute of Art and Design, after days spent working in the orchards. His teachers were Dov Feigin and Moshe Sternschuss, members of the "New Horizons" group, which during these years was beginning to lose the central place it had held in the world of Israeli art.
In 1964 he married Bianca Eshel, who was also a student in the Avni Institute and a widow of an Israeli Air Force pilot who had been killed in the Sinai Campaign. After the wedding the couple moved to Ra'anana. In addition to Eshel's daughter from her first marriage, a son, Aram Gershuni, was born to them in 1967 and a second son, Uri Gershuni, in 1970.
Gershuni's artistic path began with abstract sculpture, strongly influenced by pop art. His first solo exhibition was mounted in 1969 in the Israel Museum. In the 1970s Gershuni produced a series of works influenced by the conceptual art of Europe and America.
Gershuni's first important works made use of automobile tires ("Inner Tubes"). The use of this material constituted a continuation of his preoccupation with soft materials, but Gershuni introduced new characteristics which had been absent in his work before. In "The Spirit is Willing, But the Flesh is Weak" (1969), for example, Gershuni exhibited inner tubes lined up in a row along a wall. The title of the work, taken from "Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 26:41)," referred to the gap between the body and the spirit, and between the perception of reality and human consciousness. A similar work was exhibited in 1970 in the "Group Autumn Exhibition" in the Helena Rubenstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art. Gershuni created a large sculptural installation called "Inner Tubes," which included rows of 64 tire inner tubes arranged in piles and creating a net ("grid") in the style of minimalist art. The work received broad public exposure because of a television reporter on Channel 1 who visited the exhibition and focused on Gershuni's sculpture as an uncompromisingly curious object.
In 1972 Gershuni began to teach in the Department of Fine Arts of "Bezalel." He was considered one of the central teachers, who supported experimental and political art. In 1978 Gershuni began to teach at HaMidrasha - The Art Teachers Training College in Ramat Hasharon, where he continued to teach until 1986.
In 1979 his solo exhibition entitled "Little Red Sealings" opened at the "Sarah Levy Gallery." The exhibition included paper and photographs that had been treated with red paint, a color which was to become significant in Moshe Gershuni's work in the coming years. The works exhibited a number of artistic influences by citing the names of artists such as the Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso and the Israeli painter Aviva Uri. A group of his works included imagery taken from iconic art works.
Gershuni often created works that had a direct social and political message. In a series of works entitled "Arik Sharon and the Indians" (1979), for instance, Gershuni made use of a pickup truck with a man holding a rifle sitting on it. Gershuni imposed red markings on them and a hand-written caption with the name of the work. In his work "Golda Meir" (1979) Gershuni wrote the name of Prime Minister Golda Meir on a portrait of the queen from the painting by Francisco Goya, "Charles IV of Spain and His Family" and gave the painting a red frame made up of paint smudges.
In the beginning of the 1980s Gershuni abandoned "Post-minimalist" sculpture and the conceptual approach in order to create a series of paintings. In his first works from this period paint stains appeared in red or glittering purple, with blurry outlines, produced with glass paints on glossy paper. Until 1981, his paintings included more identifiable images, with a specific iconography. Among the images are flags, mainly in yellow and green, and bonfires with smoking torches. These paintings were done by spreading on paint with his fingers while lying on the floor next to the canvas. In many of the paintings there began to appear quotes from Israeli songs and poetic verses from the Bible, which Gershuni indicated he had sung while painting these works. The development of this style was influenced by the "Bad Painting" style which developed in Europe and America during this period.
The first exhibition of these works took place in the Givon Art Gallery in Tel Aviv and was called "Hey, Soldier." Among the works included in the exhibition were paintings entitled "Soldier! Soldier!" (1981) and "Sing Soldier" (1981).
In 1982-1983 Gershuni began a series of paintings that included images of the flower cyclamen. The cyclamen, according to Gershuni, represents a national motif and often appears in Hebrew poems for children. Another iconographic source is Haim Gouri's song "Bab al-Wad" (1948). In 1984 Gershuni created the series "Hai Cyclamens," (18 Cyclamens) which was exhibited in the Givon Gallery in 1984. The series is composed of 18 paintings, each of which is spread over 2 sheets of paper held together by tape, making them 140 X 200 cm total in size. Besides the images of flower petals and cyclamen petals, which form a thick, upward-pointing tangle, quotations from Gouri's song also appear in the paintings and a number of verses from Psalms 103: "who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion." These verses are arranged around the edges of the paintings as a sort of frame.
In addition to his expressive works, Gershuni began work on a large number of prints which he created at the Jerusalem Print Workshop. Among his works in this medium that stand out are the series of etchings called "Kaddish" (1984), each of which includes words from the Jewish prayer of mourning Kaddish, a series of prints from the poems of Hayim Nahman Bialik (1986), etc.
In 1986 a large exhibition of Gershuni's paintings, curated by Zalmona, was held in the Israel Museum. The exhibition - entitled "For Man and Beast are Creatures of Chance" - displayed the major series of Gershuni's works from the time he moved into the medium of painting.
At the end of the 1980s Gershuni began once again to create works that used old porcelain ware. Works such as "Here I Am!!!," "Justice Shall Walk Before Him," or "Where Are All the Jews?" all of them from 1988, included textual imagery drawn from Jewish sources. Gershuni juxtaposed them to graphic images such as stars or Magen Davids (Stars of David), swastikas, and fingerprints.
In 1990 a large solo exhibition of Gershuni's works, entitled "Works, 1987-1990" and curated by Itamar Levy, was held at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The exhibition presented new images that had been added to Gershuni's iconography, among them, wreaths of flowers. The wreaths, which in Western culture are perceived as symbols of victory and of mourning, appeared in Gershuni's works as self-contained images floating in empty space. Alongside wreaths with abundant petals were also wreaths that were nearly bare.
In May 1996 Gershuni held a joint exhibition with Raffi Lavie in the Givon Gallery in Tel Aviv. The exhibition was considered one of the most important exhibitions of its time, not only because it presented a body of works of two canonical figures in Israeli art, or as it was defined, of "local masters turning 60," but primarily because of its relationship to Israeli public space. Gershuni's works, which included captions such as "El Male Rachamim" [God, Full of Mercy], from the "Kaddish" prayer, included images in large, dark paint stains, similar to eyes, making use of the thick impasto.
In addition to this Gershuni displayed works in a group exhibition called "After Rabin: New Works in Israeli Art" in 1998 at the Jewish Museum in New York City.
In 2000 Gershuni became romantically involved with Juan Jose Garcia Pineiro, a young Spanish man he had met on the Internet in 1999. Pineiro immigrated to Israel and began living with Gershuni in Tel Aviv. In addition, Gershuni rented a new, large studio in Southern Tel Aviv.
During the first half of the decade, a number of exhibitions that recycled earlier works of Gershuni were held.
On March 27, 2006, at Bet Gabriel on the Sea of Galilee, the exhibition "Sham-Mayim," curated by Gideon Ofrat, opened. In this exhibition Gershuni returned to the image of wreaths. He used watercolors and acrylic paint in shades of blue. In some of the paintings the expression "Field of Sacred Apples," a kabbalistic expression from the liturgical poem by Isaac Luria, "Azmir le-Shabahim" (I Sing Psalms in Honor of Shabbat), chanted at the Friday night meal, appears.
On June 24, 2006 an exhibition opened at the Givon Art Gallery in which Gershuni displayed a series of paintings on fabric, done in the technique of Impasto [paint applied thickly] using oil paints and thickening gel, with a spray dripping water on the damp gel layer. These paintings, which he had begun to create at the beginning of the decade, had the look of "fields of paint," in the style of the "New York School." The works strove, in Gershuni's words, to be "a transparent screen of shadows that come from the black place." In this way Gershuni sought to make the viewer look at and thus become aware of how a painting creates an artistic illusion. In the exhibition that he mounted at the Givon Art Gallery, Gershuni even directed groups of lights on the paintings in a way that created different focuses of light on the surfaces of the paintings. A similar exhibition," "Whoever Sheds the Blood of Man in Man his Blood be Shed," [An Eye for an Eye] from Pirkei Avot, took place in March 2008 in the Kfar Saba Municipal Art Gallery. At the same time Gershuni began to create a series of medium-sized bronze sculptures. These sculptures were produced using bronze casting methods from different sculptures, probably figurative, made by amateur sculptors.
In 2002 Gershuni was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. In spite of the effects of the disease, Gershuni continued with his artistic output. A series of works that aroused great interest in the press in this regard was a group of drawings called "Summer 2009" that was displayed in 2009 in the Givon Art Gallery. The exhibition displayed a large series of papers, both small and medium in size, with images of light blue patches of color. A group of these drawings was later exhibited at the Museum of Art, Ein Harod, within the framework of the Collection of Gaby and Ami Brown.
In November 2010, a retrospective exhibition of Gershuni's works opened at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, curated by Sarah Breitberg-Semel. Another exhibition of his works from the 1980s onward opened in November 2014 at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Germany.
Gershuni died on 22 January 2017 in Tel Aviv at the age of 80.
Awards and recognition
- 1969 Aika Brown Prize, Israel Museum
- 1982 Sandberg Prize for an Israeli Artist, Israel Museum
- 1988 Minister of Education and Culture Prize for a Young Artist,
- 1989 Kolb Prize, Tel Aviv Museum
- 1994 Sussman Prize, Yad Vashem
- 1995 Mendel and Eva Pondik Prize, Tel Aviv Museum
- 2000 George and Janet Jaffin Prize Since America-Israel Cultural Foundation
- 2003 Israel Prize was cancelled as he refused to participate at the awards ceremony
- 2003 Honor Member of the LGBT community for his contribution to culture.
- 2006 Yakir Bezalel Jerusalem
See also
- Visual arts in Israel
