Eran Shakine Graffitigirl
Eran Shakine
Graffitigirl
Eran Shakine cover.indd 1
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Eran Shakine cover.indd 2
4/24/14 11:09
Eran Shakine Graffitigirl
Eran Shakine May 2014
Exhibition Curator Leore Yahel Ohad Gallery Directors Anat Bar Noy, Leore Yahel Ohad Catalogue Graphic Design Roitman Design Text Dan Miron Adi Puterman English translation Maya Shimony Photography Ran Arde Eran Shakine portrait Uri Gershuni, p 4 Maya Kadishman, p 95 Printed by A.R. Printing On the cover Detail of Giacometti’s Granddaughter as a Supermodel (sitting) Thanks to: Dan Miron, Adi Puterman, Erez Zemack, Shai Zemack, Anat Bar Noy Naomi Leshem Special thanks: Leore Yahel Ohad, Maya Kadishman Zoe, Mika, and Adam Kadishman Shakine
All sizes are in centimeters, height × width
© 2014 All rights reserved to Zemack Ltd. & to Eran Shakine
Mika and Mitzi 2008-13, h 2 m. Steel and Car Paint, King George St. Tel Aviv
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About the New Works by Eran Shakine Dan Miron
Eran Shakine, a mature artist who gracefully and effortlessly navigates different media as well as seemingly different styles and trends, presents in the current exhibition – his sixteenth solo show – four series of new works, each seems to stand by itself, faithful to its own rules of visual representation and highlighting a unique formal-thematic idea. In the group of sculptures “Giacometti’s Granddaughter as a Supermodel” he addresses the perception of the human body in international modern sculpture. Here Giacometti’s granddaughter is in fact also the great granddaughter of Degas. A clear line connects the girl positioned in different stances with Degas’s sculptures of dancers in their ethereal tutu skirts – after they have undergone the special treatment of Giacomettiesque sculpture, which took away their grace and plump roundness, reduced and flattened them to the brink of two-dimensionality and instilled them with the existential instability so typical of Giacometti’s figures, which brings to mind the biblical verse: “Man is like to vanity: his days are as a shadow that passeth away.” (Psalm, 144:4) Shakine puts the thin figure in motion, imbues it with renewed tangible physicality and focuses on the certain contrast between the upper body and particularly the face that conveys the youth and blandness of the girl, and the muscular, somewhat distorted legs, that look like the legs of an older woman whose occupation demands that she spends long hours standing, dooms her to a poise and grace that come at a high cost. In another group of sculptures “The Cottage Cheese Protest”, the threedimensional object serves as an acerbic social comment on the protest movement that was heralded with great noise and a massive media coverage and ended with bruised chairs and zero results. The irony of the series is apparent in the sculptures of open mouths planted in the cheese cups (the same one whose soaring price led to the resentment that sparked the protest). These mouths look like casts in a dentist’s laboratory and bring to mind tooth ache or hunger more than the cheese whose taste the fleshy tongue asks: more! As does the single pink finger, which seems to call: come, join me! It too tells a story of unsatisfied hunger and an unanswered call for a change.
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The series of photographs “Graffitigirl” presents urban art, which also carries a social significance. The stereotypical figure of the light-footed girl is integrated in increasingly derelict urban backgrounds, until it is reduced to trash heaps and broken objects carelessly discarded. Shakine virtuously exploits the painterly possibilities embodied in the neglected walls of dirty entrances and stairways, which had not seen a painter’s brush in ages, as well as the contrast between the crisp black line of the graffiti and the faded grey-brown background colors that merge with one another in harmony of peeling plaster and whitewash blackened by the years. He even produces chromatic beauty from this contrast that still maintains the full force of its social meaning. This series of the art of urban deterioration is in many respects the most elaborate of the series featured in the exhibition. Most moving is the series of portraits painted in traditional technique with oil paints on canvas – the classic technique of portrait painting. The artist painted with sensitivity and love portraits of two of his children, the girl Mika and the boy Adam, while paying particular attention not to the figure in general but rather to the young eyes and awkward stance of children-teenagers who are caught between childhood and adulthood, pretending to be a woman and a man while their mother’s milk is still wet on their lips. The ambivalent state of the painted people is revealed in the best paintings in a certain difference between their two eyes – difference in color and shape, which can be attributed to the direction of the light, but can also be understood as a brilliant marking of the line between the two states – childhood and adulthood – which the painted people are still oscillating between its one side to the other without a final decision. The viewer observing all these will inevitably wonder what is common to the series that seem so different from one another; in what way do they all carry the mark of the artist who made them? The answer to these questions will not be given at first glance; yet, a concentrated and extensive observation will inevitably arrive at it. Shakine is revealed in this exhibition as an artist who looks from different viewpoints at man’s place in the physical and social space that surrounds him. He is the poet of man’s unstable, orphaned
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place in the world. “Giacometti’s Granddaughter” is a supermodel but also a slim and fragile girl, standing on tortured and bent legs propped on heels that are too high and precarious. The bend of these legs, the kneaded materiality of their muscles tells the story of the supermodel’s walk on the runway of an unsympathetic and uncompassionate world; a world of fast consumption devoid of any relation to the consumed object. The broken chairs, still holding the figure of the person thrown off them, and the open mouths of “The Cottage Cheese Protest”, recount a similar human story in a different context, yet not entirely dissimilar. Here too we are faced with an item associated with man, whether in a synecdochical manner (the mouths, the finger) or in a metonymical manner (the chairs) as it takes part in the drama of consumption that eradicates the human. The Cottage Cheese Protest
The Graffitigirl is a part of the desolation in which she is revealed, but at
2014, Cottage cheese cup, and
the same time she is also the one who wishes to walk away from it in a
synthetic clay
light step apparent in the graceful sneakers-clad legs. Wishes – but can’t. From one photograph to the next she seems to be more imprisoned in an aging and worn out world of junk, smaller in the roar of the dumpster, with no chance of leaving it. In a sense it is a poignant icon of Israeli youth. Sensitive of all are the portraits of the children trying to act like adults: the child-girl who covered her face with her mother’s lipstick and makeup, the boy who displays the buds of his beard like a young rooster, attempting – unsuccessfully, to call the rooster’s crow. The sensitive observant father who painted these kids, heart touching in their insecurity of their place and situation in the world, he is the one who created the assembly of works featured in this rich exhibition presented before the viewer.
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Giacometti’s Granddaughter as a Supermodel
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Giacometti’s Granddaughter as a Supermodel 2013, Bronze with Polished Black Patina and Stainless Steel, h 200
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Giacometti’s Granddaughter as a Supermodel (sitting) 2013, Bronze with Polished Black Patina and Stainless Steel, 55×20×35
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Degas’s Dancer as a Stripper 2012, Bronze with Polished Black Patina and Fabric, 49×30×35
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50% Giacometti 50% Helmut Newton 2012, Bronze with Polished Black Patina and Stainless Steel, 80x17x13
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Giacometti’s Granddaughter as a Supermodel 2012, Bronze with Polished Black Patina and Stainless Steel, h 150
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Giacometti’s Granddaughter as a Supermodel (large legs, sitting) 2013, 22 Bronze with Polished Gold Patina and Stainless Steel, 140×210×110
Cheerleader 2013, Bronze and Stainless Steel, 110x33x23
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Giacometti’s Granddaughter as a Supermodel (large legs) 2013, Bronze with Polished Gold Patina and Stainless Steel, 265×120×83
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Giacometti’s Granddaughter as a Supermodel, (Legs Up) 2014, Bronze with Polished Gold Patina and Stainless Steel, 200×125×62
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Giacometti’s Granddaughter as a Supermodel (catwalk) 2012, Bronze with Polished Black Patina and Stainless Steel, 78×17×13
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Giacometti’s Granddaughter as a Supermodel 2013, Bronze with Polished Black Patina and Stainless Steel, h 200
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Giacometti’s Granddaughter as a Supermodel (sitting 2) 2013, Bronze and Polished Black Patina, and Stainless Steel, 60x25x20
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Spidergirl 2013, Bronze with Polished Black Patina and Stainless Steel, 42×43×32
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Portraits
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Mika with Black Eyeliner and Mascara 2013, Oil on Canvas, 30×40
Mika with Pink Lipstick 2014, Oil on Canvas, 30×40, Private Collection
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Adam 2014, Oil on Canvas, 30Ă—40
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Mika with Foundation Makeup 2014, Oil on Canvas, 30×40 on next page
Zoë with Black Eyeliner and Mascara 2013, Oil on Canvas, 30x40 Menashe Kadishman Collection
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Mika Watching FTV 2014, Oil on Canvas, 40Ă—30
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Adam 2014, Oil on Canvas, 30×40 on next page
Zozo with Red Lipstick 2013, Oil on Canvas, 30×40
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Sticks and Cardboard
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Sticks and Cardboard 2014, Bronze, 213×100×68
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Chair 2012, Bronze and Car Paint, 80×40×40 Serge Tiroche Collection
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Chair 4 2014, Bronze, 80×40×40
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Chair 3 2012, Bronze and Car Paint, 80×40×40 Private Collection
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Graffitigirl
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On The Evolution of Graffitigirl Adi Puterman
More than a decade ago when the image of Graffitigirl first appeared in Eran Shakine’s work, she could never have predicted the transformations she would undergo until she could grow to be the descendant of one of contemporary art’s founding fathers; Joseph K.’s granddaughter. Drawn with a black colored oil stick, the image of this young girl presents to its viewer nothing but formalistic essentials; a figure created solely by a black line that defines the human body’s contour. Faceless and devoid of bodily features, absent of details, garments and identity, this mysterious image proves to be a recurring protagonist in Shakine’s artistic portfolio of the last decade. Graffitigirl first appeared as part of a series of drawings created between 20022004; a series of drawings on canvases that present linear human figures with no identifying features apart from the black line defining their human form. Faceless and empty, these figures are interpreted by body language and gesture rather than by particularity and details. The emptiness radiating from these images resonates with the formalistic exploration so prevalent in Shakine’s practice, while directing the viewer towards a universal query that is perhaps more sociological than art- historical. The anonymity, the silence, the uniform form, reveal an intense investigation into the human psyche, and more specifically into the modern concept of singularity. Through these figures, Shakine explores the position of the individual within a collective and raises questions about how to maintain individuality while preforming the roles assigned to us by Western society. In the next stage of Graffitigirl’s development, Shakine removed the image from the studio and started to apply it on various surfaces in public spaces; building walls and doorways, construction sites, fences, wooden plates, and a variety of found urban debris. Working as a graffiti artist of sorts, Shakine began to imprint his signature—in the form of this image—on Tel Aviv’s urban landscape. Now a part of the city’s visual fabric, disappearing as buildings are demolished and reappearing in alternative locations, Graffitigirl in her current incarnation exceeds formal exploration and highlights social contemplation; here she blossoms into a full bodied social commentary. In taking the image out of the studio and into the street, Shakine plays an artistic move that constructs the girl, physically at least, as an active part of society. That is to say, that in appropriating Street Art practices, Shakine in fact, highlights the issue of individuality, and further enforces it by posing questions about how we, as a collective, render other human beings as
Untitled 41 (Graffitigirl)
visible or invisible.
2014, Color print, 36.5×27.5
The move out to the street inevitably led to the image’s current state and latest phase of evolution as Graffitigirl, 2014 (Joseph K.’s Granddaughter). In this work,
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Shakine brought the image back indoors, but this time onto the gallery walls and with an intellectual wink. In this variation of Graffitigirl, the image is painted on a door (found on one of Shakine’s graffiti excursions) and imported into the gallery space. He then photographed the old decrepit door with the girl’s image and printed it to life-size scale, placing the print on the gallery wall right next to the original door. The juxtaposition of an object and its photographic representation creates a direct association, if not an explicit reference, to Joseph Kosuth’s iconic work One and Three Chairs (1965); an exemplar of conceptual art which is comprised of a chair; a photograph depicting this same chair installed in the room and printed to life-size; and a dictionary definition of the word ‘chair’. Since the photograph depicts the chair exactly as it is installed in the room, the work changes with each installation.
Joseph Kosuth
Similar to Kosuth, Shakine juxtaposes the door and its representation—original and
One and Three Chairs, 1965
reproduction—confronting ideas about artistic production processes; and similar to Kosuth’s chair, which changes every time it is installed, Shakine’s door too, is ever changing, ever evolving. But while Kosuth’s work demonstrates how a concept can remain constant despite the changes in an artwork’s physical elements, Shakine’s work is precisely about the changing of its own elements. The fact that the door will continue to deteriorate with time makes this an artwork that is in constant flux, a living piece if you wish. More so, that the representation of the door will remain the same—as a frozen moment in time- isolates the reproduction from its original. Thus, herein lies the main difference between Shakine and Kosuth; if Kosuth’s work was an attempt to reduce the gap between concept and its realization, Shakine’s work is an effort to create this gap anew and to amplify it by bestowing on it new meanings. Shakine’s use of a found object as an original and the removal of the door from its natural surroundings grants the work additional layers of meaning, but furthermore it connects the artistic action to the historical evolution of the Graffitigirl. The philosophical elements encompassed in this work bring Shakine’s artistic inquiry one level higher and one step deeper in a discussion that is simultaneously art historical, political and social. The power of this piece lies perhaps in that it refers directly to art history but succeeds in avoiding the historical charge. In addressing pressing social issues, Shakine transforms the work from an historical reference to a comment on contemporaneity.
Untitled 37 (Graffitigirl) 2014, Color print, 27.5×36.5
The artistic processes exemplified by the image of Graffitigirl presents a complex intellectual investigation; in every stage of her life the image goes through an additional formal reduction while it gains additional meaning. From the studio to the street, to a door and back to the gallery space - Graffitigirl maintains her silence, her critical edge. Behind the black, seemingly simple line lies a multiplicity of layers, references, allusions and visual clues that are just waiting to be deciphered.
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Joseph K.’s Granddaughter Three Medium Installation 2014, Found wooden door, graffiti ink, household oil paint, dry pigments, polyurethane varnish, canvas, and color print Door 230×80, Canvas 160×130, Color Print 230×80
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Three Sides of the Fence 74
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Three Sides of the Fence Three Medium Installation 2014, Found galvanized steel fence panel, graffiti ink, household oil paint, dry pigments, polyurethane varnish, canvas, color print Steel Panel 200×100, Canvas 180×140, Color Print 46×150
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Open Sesame 2014, Found kitchen cabinet door, household oil paint, dry pigments, polyurethane varnish, canvas, 153Ă—100
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Nostalgia My Love 2014, Found artificial flowers, Oil on Canvas, 180Ă—130
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Brick by Brick 2014, Found silica brick, household oil paint, dry pigments, polyurethane varnish, canvas, 160Ă—120
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Untitled 6 (Graffitigirl) 2014, Color print, 36.5Ă—27.5
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Untitled 12 (Graffitigirl) 2014, Color print, 90x66
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Untitled 36 (Graffitigirl) 2014, Color print, 36.5Ă—27.5
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Untitled 48 (Graffitigirl) 2014, Color print, 36.5x27.5
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Untitled 1 (Graffitigirl) 2014, Color print, 36.5x24.5
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Untitled 52 (Graffitigirl) 2014, Color print, 36.5x27.5
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Born in Tel Aviv, 1962 Studied art at Wizo Art School, Tel Aviv 1987-1992 Lived in New York, assistant to artist Karl Appel Selected Solo Exhibitions
Public Sculptures and
2014
Graffitigirl, Zemack Contemporary Art Gallery, Tel Aviv
Permanent Installations
2013
Art for Sale/Sail, Special project for fashion night TLV
Museum Tower Plaza, Tel Aviv / Rothschild
2012
Sunny Side Up, Zemack Contemporary Art Gallery, Tel Aviv
Boulevard, Tel Aviv / Tel Aviv Artists
2011
Good help is hard to find..., Zemack
House / Ashdod Park / Gan HaTzuk,
Contemporary Art Gallery, Tel Aviv
Netanya / The College of Management,
2010 Catwalk, Gallery 39, Tel Aviv
Rishon LeZion / Gan Kineret, Kfar Saba
Minimal contradictions, TWIG Gallery, Brussels, Belgium
2009
Don’t worry, Julie M. Gallery, Toronto
Grants and Scholarships
2008
Sabbath Match, Gallery 39, Tel Aviv
1995 Artist in residence, Cité
2007
The Artist Who did not Look Back, Gallery 39, Tel Aviv
Internationale des Arts, Paris
2003
Domestic, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art
1989-90 Arts Matters, New York
2000-02 Julie M. Gallery, Tel Aviv 1997
New Sculptures, Museum of Israeli Art, Ramat Gan
Public Collections
1995
Pools, Artists House, Jerusalem
The British Museum, London / Ludwig
1990
Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel
Museum, Aachen, Germany / The Israel
1989
Selected 43, The Drawing Center, New York
Museum, Jerusalem / Tel Aviv Museum of
1987
Givon Fine Arts Gallery, Tel Aviv
Art / Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art / The Open Air Museum, Tefen / Ein Harod
Selected Group Exhibitions
Museum
2013
Pulse Art Fair Miami
2012
Puls Art Fair NYC, Shanghai Contemporary,
Selected Bibliography
Art Platform Los Angeles,
Barbara A. MacAdam, ARTnews,
Art Toronto, Art Miami, with Zemack Gallery
Nuit Banai, Artforum International Magazine
2012
“We have a champion!” Eretz Israel Museum, Tel aviv
Aviva Lori, Haaretz Magazine
2011
Pulse Art Fair, LA and Miami, with Zemack Gallery
2010
Art Brussels, with TWIG Gallery
Books
2009
Timebuoy, The Tel Aviv Biennial, Art TLV
“Sunny Side Up” Hirmer 2011
2008
Van Gogh in Tel Aviv, Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv
2005
On the Banks of the Yarkon, Tel Aviv Museum of Art
2000
The Vera, Silvia and Arturo Schwarz Collection,
Tel Aviv Museum of Art
1999
Drawing: New Acquisitions,
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
1994
Contemporary Art Meeting, Tel Hai 94, Israel
Israeli Sculpture 1948-1998, The Open Museum, Tefen
1984
Noemi Givon Gallery, Tel Aviv
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Eran Shakine cover.indd 2
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Eran Shakine Graffitigirl
Eran Shakine
Graffitigirl
Eran Shakine cover.indd 1
4/24/14 11:09