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Indepth Arts News:
"Present Tense 4"
1999-09-03 until 0000-00-00
Israel Museum
Jerusalem, ,
IL Israel
Mystery and double-entendre, skewed perspectives, minimalist shapes, and the relations between old and new museum pieces are the central concepts woven through the Israel Museum’s newest exhibition of contemporary art from its collection. Present Tense 4 is the fourth in a series of exhibitions highlighting the holdings of the Museum’s Department of Contemporary Art juxtaposing newly acquired works with other contemporary masterpieces.
In the exhibition’s first gallery, Damian Hearst’s canvases project images from horror movies ranging from Frankenstein to The Silence of the Lambs. The second gallery showcases works of skewed perspective, including Kiki Smith’s giant crystal sperm and Charles Ray’s The Nuclear Family. In the third gallery, featuring minimalist works, Agnes Martin’s Morning hints at the lines of warp and weft etched into stone in ancient times, echoed also in Superstudio’s Kavaderna table.
The installation in the fourth and final gallery takes advantage of the Museum’s encyclopedic holdings by juxtaposing a 19th-century sukkah (a traditional structure built for the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot) from Southern Germany with large-scale works by contemporary artists: Mariko Mori’s video installation Lunar Connection/Moon Ties; and Antoni Gormeley’s Lost Subject. These installations emphasize both obvious and subtle connections among works from disparate collections at the Museum; the traditional and the modern, the permanent and the transitory, folk tradition and high-tech are all emphasized in the interplay among these important works from different aspects of the culture of the Museum’s collections.
Background
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem is the nation’s largest cultural institution, with encyclopedic collections ranging from pre-history through contemporary art. The Museum, which receives approximately 750,000 visitors annually from Israel and around the world, mounts more than thirty exhibitions each year and has a permanent collection of nearly 500,000 objects in all of the fine arts and in archaeology, Judaica, and ethnography.
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