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MICHAEL KOVNER PORTSCAPES ¯·Â˜†Ï‡ÎÈÓ††ÏÓ†Ï˘†˙‡˜ÂÈ„
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MICHAEL KOVNER
PORTSCAPES
Born in 1948 in Kibbutz Ein Ha-Horesh in the Sharon, Michael Kovner started his art studies in the ‘60s with Yohanan Simon. In 1972 he went to the USA to study at the New York Studio School, where he was privileged to meet the artist Philip Guston, who became his teacher and friend. In the summer of 1975 he returned to Israel, settling in Jerusalem. The Jerusalem Artists’ House held an exhibition of the abstract paintings that he had executed in New York. It consisted of large works, very powerful in their use of color and form. On his way back to Israel, he had traveled in Spain, the south of France and Italy, viewing the works of the great painters of the past. From this experience he realized that, for him, abstract art was a dead end. His exhibition in 1979 at the Bineth Gallery in Tel Aviv included, for the first time, bird’s eye views of desert landscapes that combined a concrete vision with abstract values. Ever since, he has been absorbed in landscape painting, exciting art lovers with his scenes of the Judean wilderness, houses in Gaza and multiple perspectives of Jerusalem. To a certain extent, Kovner is continuing the traditional Land of Israel painting that was prevalent from the ‘20s to the ‘50s, until its rejection by the painters of the New Horizons group. But, in contrast to artists such as Gutman, Mokady, Rubin and others, who were not born in the country and who therefore emphasized its romantic aspects and exotic naivete, Kovner’s landscape is an integral part of life as he experienced it while growing up here: the power of the color in his pictures is mixed with the sorrow of existence, vitality with dream, in the full consciousness of existential fragility and finality. In this book, he presents with line, color and words his portrait of a port: its visual and conceptual uniqueness, its legendary and utopian aspects. Poetry, description and documentation complete Michael Kovner’s portscapes.