Eran Shakinee The Rabbi Goes swimming
Eran Shakine
The Rabbi Goes Swimming
3
Eran Shakine – The Rabbi Goes to the Sea (2013-2014) Sivan Raveh
This body of works by Eran Shakine combines two central themes in his work:
connections with things in the world, and above all dependence on the textual source
canonic modern art and the symbols of Israeli Jewry. In the series The Rabbi Goes to
– religious, mythological, literary – makes the calligraphic image of the rabbi look like
the Sea these themes undergo formal reduction, which places them in a historical
excess meaning. The aspiration for autonomous visual expression enfolds within itself
and ideational perspective touching on a broad array of cultural, artistic, and political
a yearning for the idea of carnality and for redemption, which run counter to the Jewish
concerns. The images of the forefathers of modernism, which appeared in a series of
world created with a word. At hand is the question whether the idiom of modern painting,
paintings from 2008 to 2010, are now replaced by a stylistic signature, a kind of formal
abstract painting, is able to encompass the believing Jew without demanding that he shed
trace transposed into the experience of Israeli-Jewish reality. The symbols of Land-of-
his identity. Is it really possible, to paraphrase Moses Mendelssohn, to be a Jew at home
Israel Jewry also undergo radical reduction: the skullcaps, the candlesticks, and the
and a modern outside?
20:16 Uhr
Seite 1
Nuit Banai
menorahs now give way to a lone figure, a religious man in hassidic garb carrying two
Ed.
dimensional objects to a calligraphic sign. Thus Shakine continues his engagement with the relation between form and word, which in the works of the progenitors of
modern visual form and the textual signifier silences the droll layer, which softened
“Untitled 1” shows the rupture between the world of the believing Jew and modern reality in clear, formal terms: the rabbi’s sidelocks assume shapes that recall the “black paintings” of Frank Stella (among them Die Fahne Hoch!) and the space between the metaphoric father of the old world and the secular son of the free world seems unbridgeable, as
Hirmer
Goes to the Sea all the paintings are “Untitled.” The new connection between the
Eran Shakine
Sunny Side Up
Edition J.B.Tesch
modernism appeared as a title within the body of the painting, while in The Rabbi
Eran Shakine Sunny Side Up
bags in his hands. The Jewish signs undergo yet another transformation, from three-
Shakine_DECKE•
16.09.2011
20:16 Uhr
extreme as the opposition of black to white. This transformation is not the outcome of organic development, but an implication of the rupture and the horror that befell Europe
Seite 1
Nuit Banai
the critical dimension of the works of the forefathers of modernism. So in the painting
Ed.
sharp and caustic look, generate the feeling that he prefers to look out to the viewer rather than at the yellow square set on the plate before him. In the United States,
foreshortening, forms a stain of color, some sort of disturbance which makes Albers’ punctilious foreignness reverberate. The square recalls “yellow” in Alexander Rodchenko’s series “Last Paintings”; they are the “last” because the utopian society
Hirmer
to him as a fried egg. The yellow square, which is defined without correct perspective Eran Shakinee; Sunny Side Up, 2011 Hirmer Publishers
in the twentieth century. The array of the lines and the waves in Shakine’s black paintings create at times abstract mazes in which the figure of the rabbi is inescapably trapped. Some of the works indicate a double captivity – once of the body in its ultra-Orthodox dress, and once of its factional belonging. The rabbi’s figure constitutes an otherness, which is perceived in the eyes of the “enlightened” Israeli-Jewish secularity as a historical
Edition J. B.Tesch
whither he went with his Jewish wife on the rise of the Nazis in 1933, it is served up
Eran Shakine Sunny Side Up
Josef Albers Having a Sunny Side Up (2010), Albers’ stern face, more especially his
Eran Shakine
Sunny Side Up
Hirmer
16.09.2011
Hirmer
Shakine_DECKE•
relic. A kind of distant relative, whose presence jeopardizes its balance of terror against various kinds of otherness – the Muslim other, whose religious belief is classified, for convenience and for political correctness, as “authentic,” and Western otherness, which is imagined as the progressive, liberal horizon.
that was to arise on values emanating from the liberty, fraternity and equality of the French Revolution would have no further need for art. All this proceeds in step with
Another aspect of the friction between the ghetto of the religion of art and the Jewish
the fading of European hegemony across the Atlantic. The pure geometrical form,
ghetto is there, in the liminal state of the seashore. The spirit of God hovers over the
with its primary values of color, is slashed through and recomposed as a Shield of
water, while on the land the Divine Presence appears in sensual layers of paint and
David and as the generic marker of the defiled, the alien, the separate – of the “Jewish
erotic formalism. In the middle is the image of the man in black. At the place where the
Problem.” Life, as Albers’ heavy body posture confesses, has trounced art. Albers’ body
sculpture of the skullcaps in Sabbath Game (2008) created a topography that suggested
ends at the level of the middle of the ribs, in a straight line reminiscent of countless
an affinity between sign and place, between the hilltop youth and the mountains of Judea
diner bars all over the United States, yet imparting to it the pose of genuflection at
and Samaria, on the sea basin the foreignness of the rabbi is emphasized even more, as
mass. Someone will have to pay for that, or as they say in his adoptive country, there’s
one still wandering in the wilderness. He treads between the colorful thighs of Mother
no such thing as a free lunch.
Earth in “Untitled p3” – all that is left of his link to the source of the tangible world is reduced to a black dotted line that gathers in his image. Infiltrated almost against his will
In The Rabbi Goes to the Sea the general unease in modern culture is augmented by
into a material reality from which he has been banished by habit, Shakine in his paintings
the specific issue of Jewry in modern society, and of ultra-Orthodox Jewry in Israeli
asserts the very quality so offensive to the iconoclasts all through scholarly Western
reality. The modernist obsession for surface values – line, form, color, for formal
thought: painting is irrevocably carnal; an image of an image, that serves the “lust of the
“purity” that is attained, or will be attained, only when art manages to sever its
eye,” which is opposed to the spiritual and intellectual passions of the soul.
4
5
My dear Hasidim, When the rabbi decided to go to the beach he gathered all his Hasidim and told them: Im going to dunk in the big mikve to save my soul, watch the shtreimel spirit till I’m back...Eran Shakine, kolel graduated went all the way with hasidic Jewish humor in a rabbinic pop style. Enjoy Dori Ben Zeev
Untitled 1 (Rabbi Goes Swiming), 2014, acrylic on canvas, 130 x 100 cm / 51.1 x 39.3 in
6
7
8
9
Untitled 3 (Rabbi Goes Swiming), 2014, acrylic on canvas, 110 x 100 cm / 43.3 x 39.3 in
on next page
Untitled 4 (Rabbi Goes Swiming), 2014, acrylic on canvas, 140 x 170 cm / 51.1 x 66.9 in
10
11
12
13
Untitled 5 (Rabbi Goes Swiming), 2014, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 130 cm / 39.3 x 47.24 in
14
15
Untitled 7 (Rabbi Goes Swiming), 2014, acrylic on canvas, 130 x 100 cm / 51.1 x 39.5 in
16
17
Untitled 8 (Rabbi Goes Swiming), 2014, acrylic on canvas, 140 x 100 cm / 55.1 x 39.3 in
18
19
Untitled 8 (Rabbi Goes Swiming), 2014, acrylic on canvas, 140 x 100 cm / 55.1 x 39.3 in
20
21
Untitled 8 (Rabbi Goes Swiming), 2014, acrylic on canvas, 140 x 100 cm / 55.1 x 39.3 in
22
23
24
Untitled 1 (Rabbi Goes Swiming),
Untitled 3 (Rabbi Goes Swiming),
2014, acrylic house paint on Lana paper 680gr., 75 × 58 cm / 29.5 × 23 in
2014, acrylic house paint on Lana paper 680gr., 75 × 58 cm / 29.5 × 23 in
25
Untitled p6 (Rabbi Goes Swiming), 2013, acrylic house paint on Lana paper, 680gr., 75 × 58 cm / 29.5 × 23 in
next page: Untitled 8 (Rabbi Goes Swiming), 2013, acrylic house paint on Lana paper 680gr., 75 × 58 cm / 29.5 × 23 in
26
27
28
29
Untitled 7 (Rabbi Goes Swiming),
Untitled 6 (Rabbi Goes Swiming),
2013, acrylic house paint on Lana paper 680gr., 75 × 58 cm / 29.5 × 23 in
2013, acrylic house paint on Lana paper 680gr., 75 × 58 cm / 29.5 × 23 in
30
31
32
33
Born in Tel Aviv, 1962 Studied art at Wizo Art School, Tel Aviv 1987-1992 Lived in New York, assistant to artist Karl Appel Public Sculptures and Selected Solo Exhibitions
Permanent Installations
2014
Graffitigirl, Zemack Contemporary Art Gallery, Tel Aviv
Museum Tower Plaza, Tel Aviv / Rothschild
2013
Art for Sale/Sail, Special project for fashion night TLV
Boulevard, Tel Aviv / Tel Aviv Artists
2012
Sunny Side Up, Zemack Contemporary Art Gallery, Tel Aviv
House / Ashdod Park / Gan HaTzuk,
2011
Good help is hard to find..., Zemack
Netanya / The College of Management,
Contemporary Art Gallery, Tel Aviv
Rishon LeZion / Gan Kineret, Kfar Saba
2010 Catwalk, Gallery 39, Tel Aviv
Minimal contradictions, TWIG Gallery, Brussels, Belgium
Grants and Scholarships
2009
Don’t worry, Julie M. Gallery, Toronto
1995 Artist in residence, Cité
2008
Sabbath Match, Gallery 39, Tel Aviv
Internationale des Arts, Paris
2007
The Artist Who did not Look Back, Gallery 39, Tel Aviv
1989-90 Arts Matters, New York
2003
Domestic, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art
2000-02 Julie M. Gallery, Tel Aviv
Public Collections
1997
New Sculptures, Museum of Israeli Art, Ramat Gan
The British Museum, London / Ludwig
1995
Pools, Artists House, Jerusalem
Museum, Aachen, Germany / The Israel
1990
Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel
Museum, Jerusalem / Tel Aviv Museum of
1989
Selected 43, The Drawing Center, New York
Art / Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art
1987
Givon Fine Arts Gallery, Tel Aviv
/ The Open Air Museum, Tefen / Ein Harod Museum
Selected Group Exhibitions 2013
Pulse Art Fair Miami
Selected Bibliography
2012
Puls Art Fair NYC, Shanghai Contemporary,
Barbara A. MacAdam, ARTnews,
Art Platform Los Angeles,
Nuit Banai, Artforum International Magazine
Art Toronto, Art Miami, with Zemack Gallery
Aviva Lori, Haaretz Magazine
2012
“We have a champion!” Eretz Israel Museum, Tel aviv
2011
Pulse Art Fair, LA and Miami, with Zemack Gallery
Books
2010
Art Brussels, with TWIG Gallery
“Sunny Side Up” Hirmer 2011
2009
Timebuoy, The Tel Aviv Biennial, Art TLV
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
34
Photograph by: Uri Gershuni
35
36