Extreme Situations - Israeli Paper
Paper is an available material which surrounds us in daily life, and is largely familiar as a platform for writing, printing, or artistic creation. This exhibition displays works in which paper plays a central and essential part, and relates to it as raw material and not as a platform, in other words, a building block of artistic work and not a surface upon which it is performed. The selected works extend the overt and covert characteristics of paper, until they reach maximal realization and are portrayed in diverse appearances.
The unique characteristics of paper were studied by 65 artists who exhibit there work here. They have taken these characteristics to unexpectedly extreme situations which arouse wonder. These works manifest conflicting material and formalistic expressionson paper: soft and rigid, transparent and opaque, delicate and rough, flexible and inflexible, static and moving. These extreme appearances were developed by the artists using the essential characteristics of the material in diverse ways of processing, thus making it possible to realize them to the full. The works challenge the material and extend its boundaries from other aspects as well. Large installationsandminiature works, the shift of paper from two to three dimensions, a wide range of material situations shifting between thin and transparent paper to one that masquerades as another material.
The exhibition displays a broad range of artistic languages and experiments in the material, which derive from the perspectives of artists who work in different fields of art and design: artists who work in the plasticarts, product designers, graphic designers, textile designers, architects, jewelry makers and paper artists par excellence; veteran artists who have been working in paper for a long time alongside young artists who are now taking their first steps in the world of art and design.
"Extreme Situations - Israeli Paper" is the third exhibition devoted to paper on display at the Erezt Israel Museum, Tel Aviv. Of the three exhibitions, the current one is the most daring and adventurous.
Curator: Anat Getenyu
Opens: March 24, 2017