Last Chance: Danse Macabre at Binyamin Gallery
Cover pic: Detail of a sculpture by Mira Maylor
This post was originally published on “Ten Days in Tel Aviv” and is posted here as part of the collaboration between Oh So Arty and Ten Days in Tel Aviv.
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Post by Laura Schwartz-Waks.
Laura grew up in Paris where she graduated her MA in Modern Art History, with a focus on Israeli contemporary art.
Laura has been living in Tel Aviv since 2009 and works at the gallery Contemporary by Golconda.
Exhibition: Danse Macabre
Curator: Dr Eran Gilat
Participating artists: Shirley Faktor, Eran Gilat, Sigalit Landau, Mira Maylor, Rani Pardes
Dates: On show until January 11th, 2014
Venue: Binyamin Gallery , 28 Chlenov Street
This week end is your last chance to visit a beautiful group show at Binyamin Gallery! Located in Florentin and managed by eleven artists, Binyamin is one of the few cooperative spaces in Tel Aviv, or as they describe themselves: “self-funded, egalitarian, clique-free and non-profit gallery”. Curated by Dr. Eran Gilat, the exhibition focuses on the contemporary expressions of the artistic genre of Danse Macabre (Dance of Death) as seen through the eyes of five Israeli artists. This late-medieval allegory, popularized in Hans Holbein the Younger’s woodcuts, emphasizes the fragility of our individual lives in regards to the universality of death that awaits us all. You might now remember from your blurry memories of philosophy class in high school that Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas (Vanity of vanities, all is vanity): to make it short, death is around the corner and thus the glory of earthly life is vain. Happy New Year.
No need to precise that this theme has been more than present in art history since the Renaissance and up till now. In Israel, the artist Yithzhak Livneh made quite an impression in his 2008’s retrospective at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art by exploring the multifaceted expressions of death and decay in his paintings.
Eran Gilat, Untitled from Life Science series
Interestingly enough, the exhibition on show at Binyamin Gallery confronts the viewer to death, but through a metaphorical path expressed by different techniques. The body in all its physicality, may it be blooming or decay, is the medium that unites the exhibition.
Hands by Shirley Factor
The paintings by Shirley Faktor also reminded us that hands, as a synecdoche to the entire body, is the artists first and most essential medium. The artist is thus the only one that can truly dance with death, his artworks surviving the body’s annihilation.
Post credits: Laura Schwartz-Waks | Ten Days in Tel Aviv