HERZLIYA.- Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art presents a group of exhibitions that raise questions about the construction of diverse narratives of Israeli art in material and conceptual and geographical contexts. including the relationship between the periphery and the center.

The exhibitions offer a re-acquaintance with fascinating and forgotten artists, who have been marginalized in the historical narrative of local art and were excluded from the local cultural hegemony, alongside exhibitions of ceramics and textiles handcrafted in traditional and contemporary techniques by artists of different generations.

The starting point of the current exhibitions is a self-exploration of the Herzliya Museum: its collection, past exhibitions, and building. The museum building is at the center of an architecture exhibition that examines the buildings of art venues.

Ruth Dorrit Yacoby: The Door to the Secret Garden
Curator: Hadas Kedar
Assistant Curator: Julia Yablonsky

The exhibition provides a close encounter with the subtlety of the works produced by Ruth Dorrit Yacoby (1952–2015), one of the most interesting female

Israeli artists of her time. Yacoby, who lived and worked in Arad, was viewed by the local art scene as an outsider. She left behind one of the most enigmatic bodies of work in the history of Israeli art. The totality and intensity of her studio practice in Arad reflected the obsessive nature and individuality of her artistic practice. The exhibition reexamines Yacoby’s oeuvre from two main perspectives: a feminist viewpoint (engaging with issues such as motherhood, femininity, and care) and her living and working conditions in the periphery of the country.

Yacoby exhibited widely, both in Israel’s major museums (including an exhibition at the Herzliya Museum, curated by Yoav Dagon), and around the world – in Europe, South America, Asia, USA, and Canada. However, in contrast to the acclaim that she received overseas, she was considered by many in the local art scene to be an outsider artist. This was possibly due to her work being at odds with the prevailing trends of the Israeli art discourse, as an artist living and working at the geographical fringes of the country and centering on feminine themes.

The current exhibition – the first major presentation of Yacoby’s work since her passing – offers a renewed contemplation of her work.

Tapping into the artist’s inner voice, the exhibition is attentive to the delicate resonances of her work, which were often muted by her own opaque artistic lexicon. The intimate viewing layout, comprising a series of rooms dedicated to key themes in her output, enables the viewer to engage with Yacoby’s artworks on a one-on-one basis. In addition to the main display in this gallery, the show also includes a screening room, where the film The Woman of a Thousand Voices (by Amram Yacoby, 2007, 66 min) is on view, presenting a hidden world of souls and voices, metaphysical places and journeys, through the artist's poems and work.

Hadas Kedar, curator of the exhibition, is the recipient of a curatorial research scholarship from the House of Israeli Art, Academic College of Tel Aviv–Yafo.

Aharon Avni: His Studio and Studia
Curator: Ron Bartos

Aharon Avni (1906–1951) is one of the most important forgotten artists in Israel. Avni was a prolific painter, an influential educator, the founder of two leading art schools, whose artistic activity had a significant cultural impact on the artistic field of pre-independence Israel. Avni’s life was short – he was only 45 at the time of his death in 1951. Exactly seventy years after his death, this exhibition and its accompanying book offer an opportunity to become acquainted with this key figure in the local history of art.

Avni forged his own style and artistic identity as an artist focused primarily on “introverted” or introspective images – a “chamber painter” of interiors, portraits, and intimate landscapes. Like other artists of his generation, he formulated a new local style of painting that was profoundly rooted in the French artistic tradition and influenced by the contemporary School of Paris. The style adopted and adapted for the local scene was perceived to be not only a modern and universal language, but one that also bore “Jewish” attributes.

Avni’s artistic outlook was consistent throughout his life. In one period he was seen as original and advanced, and in another as conservative and even old-fashioned. This change affected him not only during his lifetime, but posthumously, as well – in the form of disregard by museums, in his absence in historiographical writings, and in oblivion from public memory.

Beside his artistic work, Avni nurtured the pedagogical aspect of art education, which he saw as a mission of utmost social value and cultural importance. In 1936, he founded a school of art – the Studia. It soon became a major artistic hub in Tel Aviv, and many of the most important Israeli artists began their careers as its students, including Esther Peretz-Arad, Lea Nikel, , Buky Schwartz, Dani Karavan, Ruth Zarfati and more. After his death, the Studia was renamed the Avni Institute, which bears his name to this day.




Ilana Efrati: After the Birds’ Paradise
Curators: Aya Lurie, Natalie Tiznenko

Fashion designer and artist Ilana Efrati expressed interest in the textile works in the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art collection. At the collection storage rooms, she was drawn to an impressive and large tapestry by a rather forgotten artist, Diana Schor (b. 1926, Romania). The tapestry, titled Birds’ Paradise, was part of the Museum’s permanent exhibition for a long time under the directorship of Eugene da Villa (1962–1977). It was subsequently put in storage for over twenty years, until it caught Efrati’s eye and piqued her curiosity. She was invited to engage in a dialogue with Schor, and the outcome is on view in the current exhibition as part of the Collection+ series of exhibitions. The exhibition is the result of a long internal and external process, in which Efrati created a network of connections and contexts related to deciphering and restoring the textile’s origins and properties by tracing traditional techniques of spinning, weaving, natural dyeing, and landscape painting.

Efrati identified a blend of influences in Schor’s tapestry: motifs from Romanian folklore, drawing on ancient material culture and folk craft traditions; themes from the unique nature and geography of Romania; and a modern, universal idiom. This extensive web links Schor’s work with that of Efrati, who, for over a decade, has been dividing her life between Tel Aviv and a village in Umbria, Italy. There she runs an ecological farm with her family after many years in which she ran a fashion design studio and workshop in Israel.

The artist Diana Schor was born in Romania in 1926. She was drawn to the arts from an early age, and already in her youth studied at the Academy of Art in Bucharest. From 1968 to 1970, she lived and exhibited in Paris, where she developed close friendships with the artists Marc Chagall, Sonia Delaunay, and Man Ray. In 1972, after returning to Romania, she was invited by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to hold an exhibition in Tel Aviv, at Gallery 119 on Rothschild Boulevard. In 1980, Schor finally left Romania to live and exhibit in San Francisco.

Schor’s pursuit of decorative arts – in clay, leather, stained glass, and tapestry weaving – was born of an allegiance to the ancient material and aesthetic traditions of Romania. She won awards and commendations for her work, including at the International Ceramics Exhibition in Faenza, Italy (1962); the Quadrennial of Decorative Arts in Erfurt; Germany (1974); and the Tapestry Triennale in Lodz, Poland (1975).

Collection+
Hand Built: Multi-Generation Ceramic Sculpture in Israel
Participants: Yoav Admoni, Netaly Aylon, Hedwig Grossman, Nora Kochavi and Naomi Bitter, Abraham Kritzman Gedula Ogen, Ligal Sofer, Talia Tokatly
Curator: Tali Kayam

The starting point for this exhibition was the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art’s collection of ceramic works, put together by Yoav Dagon, its director from 1981 to 1993. The name of the exhibition – Hand Built – refers to a set of ceramic techniques that do not involve the use of instruments, including slab construction, coil construction, pinching, and press molding.

The exhibition presents the works of artists of various generations who use these techniques, in a quasi-genealogical arrangement. The legacy of unmediated contact with the clay has been passed down from teacher to student, from generation to generation – from veteran potter Hedwig Grossman, to contemporary artists who share professional knowledge and insights with each other in an online community.

On display are works from the Museum’s collection as well as new works that were created especially for the exhibition, which share common visual and material attributes that arise from the creative process. The selection of exhibits – including functional ware, animal sculptures, and hybrid works ranging from the functional to the artistic – was guided by a striving to rethink the place of ceramic ware in the canon of art.

Rechter: A Museum in a Small Town in the Middle East
Curator: Dana Gordon

The Israel Pavilion at the Biennale Giardini in Venice, designed by Zeev Rechter and his son Yacov Rechter in 1952, precisely fits into the main exhibition gallery of the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, which was designed by Yacov Rechter and his son Amnon Rechter, and inaugurated in 2000; the two spaces are precisely the same volume. Following this realization, the idea emerged to explore all “Rechterian” architecture of art venues. It is interesting to examine the intergenerational principles that are common to these designs by Rechter Architects, and the distinctive qualities of the art venues that were constructed.

The exhibition presents documents from the archives of Rechter Architects that pertain to buildings whose purpose is to display art: museums, pavilions, and galleries for permanent or temporary exhibitions. The exhibition is held in the original exhibition wing of the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art. This invites comparison between the architectural principles and ideas – as expressed in the plans, sketches, or text documents – and their realization in the physical museum space.

A conceptual sketch of the 1931 Palestine Pavilion at the Colonial Exhibition in Paris by Zeev Rechter is presented facing a contemporary photograph of the Museum building by Eli Singalovski. This highlights the connection and contrast between the imagined and the real, and unfolds the two chronological and conceptual ends of the Rechter family’s architectural work – from the International fantasy in the 1930s to the local, tangible realization, in exposed concrete, in the 1970s. In between are other works that came up in the archive search: proposals for the design of museums and exhibition venues as part of architectural competitions in the 1960s, and four constructed buildings.

Inward Gaze
Eli Singalovski: Herzliya Museum, Southern Façade

Herzliya Museum was founded in 1962 by a group of art-loving residents, headed by Eugene da Villa. In 1965, at the invitation of the city council and the developer Moshe de Shalit, the architect Yacov Rechter proposed a program integrating a Yad Labanim memorial hall for fallen soldiers and the Municipal Museum. Despite its topographical location, at the top of a hill, and despite its proximity to major public buildings in the town, such as the city hall and the law courts, its design appears to avoid the monumental, temple-like model that has been a dominant theme in museum architecture.

From the outset of his career, Eli Singalovski has focused on urban environments – in particular, Brutalist architecture. He tends to focus on the structure itself, and uses a technique of night photography with long exposures, that removes human movement from the frame. Singalovski documented the southern façade of the Herzliya Museum – a less familiar part of the museum, where the back entrance is located – and reveals a new meaning in it. He focuses on the gray, material quality of the concrete and the building’s rhythmic and measured formal vocabulary. At first glance, its introverted, inward-looking and fortified appearance in relation to its immediate surroundings seems striking. As one looks more closely, however, a number of hallmarks of suburban urbanity become apparent –testaments to the bustling life surrounding the municipal museum, which was built in the heart of a residential neighborhood.