ORI GERSHT – ALL WILL COME TO PASS
2013-09-16The photographic series titled Offering was created during the artist’s visit to the Andalusia region of Spain in 2012. The photographs capture a matador’s meticulous spiritual and physical preparation, portray the bull’s holding pen, and finally bear witness to the encounter between man and animal. As in previous works, Gersht considers private and collective histories. The photographs simultaneously inhabit spaces of volatility and harmonious elegance.Spain established their modern bullfighting tradition in the early eighteenth century. A highly ritualized event, an impeccably adorned matador baits a bull with a cape, drawing the animal in and out and around the bullfighting ring.
The event most often culminates in the bull being slain. Bullfighting images are simultaneously seductive and repellent, vital and deadly. As primal as bullfights are, a sense of beauty is captured in its ritual, tradition, and in the continuation of its practice throughout Spain in the same way. However due to recent legislation, bullfighting is on the verge of disappearing and Gersht’s photographs therefore become a form of epitaph, a testimony to the temporal nature of tradition and cultural identity.In this body of work Gersht continues his dialogue with the history of painting. Without taking a moral stand, the images converse with a long artistic tradition of religious iconography. Through contemporary and historical juxtapositions the photographs present a timeless space, a space that cannot be anchored, a space that hangs forever between past and present, between art history and contemporary practice.Unlike the bullfighting images, the series Cells, 2012 depict the holding pens in which bulls are held before they are released into the ring.The pens are considered formally and the three-dimensional aspects of these spaces are virtually erased, as the surface qualities are graphically emphasized.
Exhibition runs through to October 24th, 2013
Noga Gallery
60 Ehad Ha’am st.
Tel-Aviv
65202
Israel
