Line Againg Line

Neun Atelierbericht Aus Tel Aviv

Stadt Frankfurt Am Main

Ausstellungshalle im Karmeliterkloster

08.06.89 – 02.07.89

This exhibition defines itself as the result of a studio report about nine young painters, which we compiled within five days early this year.

Five days are a very short time span indeed to follow a trace in a region of more than a million people, which Nira Itzhaki, the active and experienced gallery owner, had laid in Frankfurt. The Tel Aviv painters she presented in Frankfurt last year gave us the incentive to follow this trace which becomes more and more important in the partner city of Frankfurt.

Most of the paintings cannot deny their neo-figurative descent; they do not disown the approach of the trans-avant-garde but try to develop an identity of their own. The exhibition now shown in the Karmeliterkloster understands itself as an up to dates studio report. Without having been prepared for a long time, without being well balanced and certainly not being dedicated to a complete survey it is meant to offer a subjective as well as active impression. Those aspects of current Israeli painting can also be seen as seismometers of aesthetic as well as social descriptions of the situation we find ourselves in.

In 1982 the first mutual exhibition between the Israeli Association of Artists in Tel Aviv and the Organization of Fine Artists in Frankfurt am Main took place in the Mann-Auditorium in Tel Aviv and the Paulskirche in Frankfurt am Main. As a result numerous personal contacts between the two cities were initiated. This exhibition in 1989 would also like to promote the dialogue between Israelis and German which is of essential relevance for their identities.

We should like to thank everyone contributing to this exhibition. We are obliged to the artists for frankly welcoming us in their studios and for their spontaneous willingness to take part in this exhibition. Our thanks also include those who are not represented here. We say  thank you to the colleagues in the Department of Culture in Tel Aviv and to the trustees of the museums for their support and for most interesting discussions. We are especially obliged to Nira Itzhaki. Without her enormous preliminary work and cooperation this exhibition would not have been possible.

Frank Muβmann | Klaus Klemp

Is it possible to delineate a distinctive tenor or tenors in Israeli art? Can one detect in Israeli art any specific statement of identity, or perhaps even crisis of identity? Where does it derive its iconography from, and indeed, what are the codes to which it responds. This exhibition is meant to bring to the fore a number of sources and characteristics, while leaving the elucidation of these basic questions open, in the hope that they will encourage a dialogue between Israeli and German artists.

The current exhibition owes its origin to a previous exhibition of Israeli art organized by the chelouche Gallery, which was held in Frankfurt in December 1988. Among the visitors were Mr. Frank Muβmann, Director of the Department of Science and Culture in the Frankfurt Municipaliyu, and Mr. Klaus Klemp, in charge of art affairs, both of whom subsequently undertook an intensive working visit to Israel, a visit that brought them into contact with some forty artists' studio and galleries in Tel Aviv.

The nine artists chosen for this exhibition reflect a significant and unique cross-section of the rising generation in Israeli art. These artists have all been open to the influence of cultural universals, incorporating then into a specifically local, Israeli statement, the content of which, moreover, is of consistent quality, their work is characterized by iconography derived both from the history of art and conflict: this becomes a set of aesthetic, religious, mythological and moral codes enciphered in a subjective syntax or according to some personal method of exegesis.

The reading differs from artist to artist, but their work all shares a private, highly emotive, viscerally expressive element, whose origin lies in their common emphasis of the subjective point of view. The form, color and media are indicative of the current tendency to return to pure painting.

…

The figures in the wok of Tova Lotan are derived from her treasury of personal reminiscences: childhood memories, dice games, dancers. These motifs, whose strength is in their design and not their conceptual figuration, are implanted by Lotan into a heavy mass of material – creating abstract yet concrete depth, the whole forming an enigmatic puzzles stemming from the depths of memory and subconscious.

Nira Itzhaki

The Strength of the Practical Image | Gideon Ofrat "Ha'aretz" June 17^th, 1988

Tova Lotan stands in the front line of contemporary high quality artists.

She works like a master on large grayish formats in the style of Arie Aroch, precisely worked in oils and lacquers, putting together layers and layers of seducing materials, so carefully composed so well performed until the point where its sensual perfection closes upon us like an ultimate energy.

It may well be said that worshiping the materials Aroch's style is finely fused to the spiritual. The colorful struggle between gray and red is an authentic burst of sensuality, but, hasn't the material form rendered the thematic image incomplete? Because Lotan is not satisfied with the rich present of abstract matter, she enriched her canvas surfaces with several symbols repeatedly used.

Here between the echoes of the Holocaust and the hidden eros one can find her dry flowers, burnt landscapes, chopped heads and an obsessive boat shaped object.

In spite of all the unique tenderness and the concentrated expression some of the motives are already familiar from the works of Anselm Kiefer, Gershuni, Larry Abrahmson and especially Enzo Cucchi.

Lotan is walking in the depth fields of the eighties and even the boat shape which changes identities form a bird into a corpse, vagina etc. influenced by ancient Egyptian Gods, is somewhat familiar.

Nevertheless I do believe in her silent symbols, the horror and sensuality of her heads, floating in the empty space. I believe because I can feel the essence of the thematic symbols hiding beneath the depressed melancholy. Yet Lotan must go on seeking her unique visual independent poetry to fulfil the great promise she is showing.

Lotan is a symptom of a rare talent trapped in the magic of the 1988 imaginative neo-figurativeness which might, unless repeatedly and authentically purged of false influence, be dragged to banality.

Follow Tova Lotan in her heroic struggle.

Friday, June 17, 1988

IN

The Jerusalem Post

HER first one-person exhibit, Tova Lotan, a graduate of Avni Institute, comes across as a strong willed individual whose large, dark canvases with blood-red highlights project an extremely introspective and magical quality. Lotan resorts to three or four stylized forms of reductive contoured shapes: an outlined, naturalistically drawn head in profile, an exotic bird and several geometric solids dispersed within the picture plane, the latter being used to brace and butt the first two elements.

Pigment is applied in a thick, almost gooey consistency as Lotan builds up tactile surfaces in a low-relief manner. It is the austere surface tensions, linked to a limited colour scheme and the mysterious subject matter filled with signs of angst and despair, that makes Lotan's pictures special. Her canvases are created with a sense of purpose and careful consideration for each and every painterly stroke.

(Chelouche Gallery, 14 Chelouche St. Neve zedek) Till June 27.