contemporary artist

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Eran Shakinee The Rabbi Goes swimming

Eran Shakine


The Rabbi Goes Swimming

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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?

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Nuit Banai

menorahs now give way to a lone figure, a religious man in hassidic garb carrying two

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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

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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•

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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

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the critical dimension of the works of the forefathers of modernism. So in the painting

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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.

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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

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Untitled 3 (Rabbi Goes Swiming), 2014, acrylic on canvas, 110 x 100 cm / 43.3 x 39.3 in

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Untitled 4 (Rabbi Goes Swiming), 2014, acrylic on canvas, 140 x 170 cm / 51.1 x 66.9 in

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Untitled 5 (Rabbi Goes Swiming), 2014, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 130 cm / 39.3 x 47.24 in

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Untitled 7 (Rabbi Goes Swiming), 2014, acrylic on canvas, 130 x 100 cm / 51.1 x 39.5 in

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Untitled 8 (Rabbi Goes Swiming), 2014, acrylic on canvas, 140 x 100 cm / 55.1 x 39.3 in

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Untitled 8 (Rabbi Goes Swiming), 2014, acrylic on canvas, 140 x 100 cm / 55.1 x 39.3 in

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Untitled 8 (Rabbi Goes Swiming), 2014, acrylic on canvas, 140 x 100 cm / 55.1 x 39.3 in

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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

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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

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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

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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 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

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Photograph by: Uri Gershuni

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