Caesarea Old City Gallery
Betty and Leon Bronstein
Participants:
Yasmine Bergner, Noam Edry, Gil Yefman, Keren Shpilsher, Sasha Serber, Shai Id Alony
“Goddesses and Gladiators is an exhibition of six young artists who use imagery and materials from contemporary popular culture, while nodding to the techniques, traditions, and icons of classical art.
The works, in mediums of sculpture, painting, collage, and etching, also relate to the special site where the gallery is located—the ancient Caesarea harbor, and the meanings raised by its history.
[…] The fetishistic art object in the works represents a search for a true identity in a world where the individual disappears into global perceptions of beauty and aesthetics, which are closely linked to the practices of consumer culture.
Those same perceptions of beauty that define the ‘right’ versus the ‘wrong,’ the ‘belonging’ versus the ‘different,’ contain underground currents of violence that reject the ‘other.’
The art object in the exhibition’s works reflects this ‘other,’ the beauty in complexity, in hybridity.
The object becomes a ‘hero,’ whether a well-known hero like Batman or Wonder Woman, or a private and anonymous hero, trying to store within it a mystical power that will allow it to change reality.
It is simultaneously pathetic and beautiful, ridiculed and full of power, using all those definitions of beauty only to turn them back toward society as a mirror reflecting its limitations, with a gaze full of humor and compassion.”
From the exhibition catalog
Curator: Maayan Sheleff
Caesarea Old City Gallery
Courtesy of Betty and Leon Bronstein
Participants:
Yasmine Bergner, Noam Edry, Gil Yefman, Keren Shpilsher, Sasha Serber, Shai Id Alony
Article by Yam Hameiri, Shamenet, Haaretz Newspaper
