Israeli pop art in a vibrant rainbow of colours will brighten up the November sky in Delhi soon. Titled Israeli Pop Art, the group exhibition featuring six leading modern pop artists from Israel is being presented by Bruno Art Group at Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi from November 9.
The six participating Israeli artists are established international names — Yaacov Agam is celebrated as the father of kinetic art, David Gerstein is known for his vibrant 3-D metal art, Calman Shemi developed the unique technique of ‘window’ and ‘lacquer’ paintings while Dganit Blechner, Yuval Mahler and Raphael Abecassis are internationally renowned for pioneering a new language in pop art.
Motti Abramovitz, Director, Bruno Art Group and curator of the show, says, “In this group show of Israeli pop art, artists experiment with displaying the modern side of Israeli art using innovative techniques and original material. The use of a bright, vibrant colour palette and 3D methods, all contribute to the creation of a unique art collection.”
Israeli artist Yaacov Agam, 86, who lives and works in Paris is the pioneer of kinetic movement in art and is its most outstanding contemporary representative as well as the highest-selling Israeli artist. His art work has been displayed in museums around the world, including the Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work plays with colour, form, time and movement, which makes his art four-dimensional and fundamentally changes the accepted idea of art as a fixed image. Born in 1939, Shemi is an Argentinean-Israeli sculptor and painter who developed two unique techniques of painting — his ‘lacquer paintings’ and ‘window paintings’. These paintings are reminiscent of ancient techniques used to create art in Japan and China centuries ago. Beginning with a colour drawing done to scale, Shemi layers irregularly shaped pieces of variously textured and coloured fabrics. Born in 1957 in Tel Aviv, Blechner earned her worldwide reputation for using vivid, bright and cheerful palette of colours in her works, together with extraordinary compositions. The collection consists of icons from movies, singers, and others, related to the world of art by expressing a unique perspective of urban life. Her collages of cities around the world have become her exclusive style, which is admired and loved by art collectors all over the world.
Born in 1951 in Haifa, Israel, Mahler draws upon a rich supply of wry humour, satire, caricature, and comedy to produce his insightful studies of human behaviour. His paintings explore human relationships under various conditions of life all over the world and sometimes exploring Jewish life. Abecassis’s name means ‘storyteller’ in Arabic, which suits him as each of his artwork tells a story. A world-renowned Sephardi artist, he combines Biblical symbols and Sephardic motifs in his work. He started painting at the age of 21 when he began studying to become an art teacher. Gerstein is considered a pioneer of 3D metal art who also works in a large spectrum of media such as wall sculptures, paper cuts, prints and photographs.
(Poonam Goel is a freelance journalist who contributes articles on visual arts for unboxedwriters.com)