TEL AVIV.- This exhibition is an encounter between the series of prints "Carceri d'invenzione" (ca. 1761) by the 18th-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, one of the greatest print artists of all times, and the installation Stairway (2012/2016) by the contemporary Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, who lives in Berlin.

Piranesi and Shiota's works are both concerned with fragments, memories, and vestiges of the past. Shiota uses thread to weave together three-dimensional lines and volumes reminiscent of the cross-hatched lines in Piranesi's prints, which are, to a large extent, prisons of unfulfilled desires. Piranesi, a native Venetian, lived in Rome and dreamt of resurrecting the city's glorious past; Shiota, who lives in Germany, sometimes dreams of being in Japan, and her works blur the line between dream and reality.

The "Carceri" series, Piranesi's masterpiece, perfectly encapsulates his virtuoso skills, combining motifs from Classical buildings, set designs, and medieval castles into unique vistas unparalleled by other artists of his time. Shiota views installation and performance art as acts of liberation from conventional painting. Her thread installations include various objects that function as substitutes for the artist's own body. Her oeuvre is largely based on that of the feminist artists of the 1970s, the pioneers of avant-garde performance and installation art.

Piranesi's prints bring together concerns with fragments, history, and memory. They also raise questions of personal, professional, and national identity, which are equally relevant to contemporary art. His impossible architectural structures, which bear no resemblance to actual prisons, convey the dark regression of consciousness into the subconscious by means of expressive, monumental variations.

The presence of a supernatural, transcendental realm is palpable in both Piranesi and Shiota's work. The image of a stairway, which appears in Piranesi's series of prints as well as in Shiota's installation is a metaphor for a transition to another sphere; a path leading, perhaps, to the world of dreams or of the subconscious. This trajectory simultaneously ascends and descends, connecting between past and future, between life and what lies beyond it. The stairs leading nowhere within the space of Shiota's installation and the endless stairways in Piranesi's prints are made of past and future architectural fragments, creating the impression of an endless, Sisyphean process.