The Tel Aviv Museum of Art Shows Contemporary Israeli Photography

Written by Jennifer Gonzalez Thursday, 08 December 2011 21:23

Tel Aviv, Israel.- The Tel Aviv Museum of Art is pleased to present "Making Room: Contemporary Israeli Photography", a new ongoing exhibition which opened at the beginning of December. Most of the works in the exhibition are new acquisitions made possible by a gift from the Tel Aviv Educational and Cultural Co. The exhibition tackles the discourse about "place" – a major concern and challenge in contemporary Israeli photography – while addressing key issues in contemporary photography, related to the modes of seeing and representation that this medium makes possible. The thirty photographs in the exhibition span a variety of representations of place ranging from landscapes, through military and civilian sites, to the private domestic space and portraits of people taken in their surroundings. These spaces are depicted through a variety of photographic approaches ranging from direct photography, through some measure of digital processing (either overt or indiscernible), to photography that is the product of utter simulation.

The critical approaches most prevalent in Israeli landscape photography – which has been the main subject of Israeli photography over the past twenty years – has mainly been influenced by American "New Topographers" and by the German typological approach, two schools that are closely connected.

Following in their footsteps, a lively local discourse about landscape has ensued, focusing, among other themes, on military remains in bare landscapes, urban architecture and modes of habitation. In that context a poetics of the banal has also developed in Israel, and "backyard aesthetics." Over the past few years critical discourse in Israeli photography seems to have become more conceptually inclined – not in the theoretical sense of an inquiry into the nature of art (as in conceptual 1970s art), but as a functional tool used mainly to examine the relation between a photograph and an image of reality.


The Tel Aviv Museum of Art is Israel’s leading museum of modern and contemporary art, and home to one of the world’s largest collections of Israeli art. Since its founding in 1932, the Museum has served as one of Tel Aviv’s major cultural hubs, displaying a vibrant mix of permanent collections and temporary exhibitions in a wide variety of fields – painting, sculpture, prints and drawings, photography, video, architecture and design. Situated in an impressive architectural complex, the Museum is an integral part of the city’s major cultural center – the Golda Meir Cultural and Art Center – home to the Israeli Opera and the Cameri Theater. One of the most diverse and dynamic cultural institutions in Israel, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art serves as a hub of activity for the local arts scene. In addition to its collections, the Museum presents performances of music and dance, film, and lecture series on philosophy and art. The fully computerized art library and its Documentation Center for Art in Israel serve over 15,000 students, scholars and curators each year. The library subscribes to the major art journals and receives the latest catalogues of exhibitions of Israeli art, modern and contemporary art, photography, design and architecture. It is the most comprehensive reference center in the Middle East. The Museum’s original building on Rothschild Boulevard has great historical significance: it was there that Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948. The Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art, an adjunct to the main building, functions as a showcase and platform for young talents. Opened in 1959, it was beautifully renovated in 1989 with funds provided by the Helena Rubinstein Foundation and the Municipality of Tel Aviv-Yafo. The Danek and Jadzia Gertner Gallery specializes in changing long-term exhibitions of decorative art. The Museum's collection represents some of the leading artists of the first half of the 20th century and many of the major movements of modern art in this period: Fauvism, German Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Russian Constructivism, the De Stijl movement and Surrealism, French art, from the Impressionists and Post- Impressionists to the School of Paris including works of Chaim Soutine, and key works by Pablo Picasso from the Blue and Neo-Classical Period to his Late Period, and Surrealists works of Joan Miró. In 1989, the American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein created a giant two-panel mural especially for the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. It hangs in the entrance foyer. The Collection includes several masterpieces, among them the painting Friedericke Maria Beer, 1916 by the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt and Untitled Improvisation V, 1914, by the Russian master Wassily Kandinsky. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, donated in 1950, includes 36 works by Abstract and Surrealist artists, including works of Jackson Pollock, William Baziotes, and Richard Pousette-Dart, and Surrealists works by Yves Tanguy, Roberto Matta, and André Masson. Sculptures are displayed in the entrance plaza and in an internal sculpture garden. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.tamuseum.com

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