Northern Horizon: A New Perspective on 1970s Landscape Painting in Israel

The 1970s are generally remembered as the heyday of conceptual art in Israel, an art form that transformed the visible world from perceptual forms into abstract ideas; a decade in which the distance between what was happening here and what was happening in New York seemed to shrink, while the distance between the studio where the artists worked and the surrounding landscape widened. The prevailing narrative in Israeli art research of this decade has consistently identified two centers: Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, which shared a rejection of oil-on-canvas painting and preferred thought over sight as basis for artistic practice.

The Haifa Museum of Art collection, which provides the foundation for this exhibition, reveals a very different 1970s: years of richly colored oil painting, whose forms are grounded in the visible place. The artists whose works are featured here all observed the local landscape closely, rendering it while applying the lessons of contemporaneous international art. They demonstrate a profound internalization of these tendencies that sought to reduce artistic expression to uniform color surfaces and abstract, universal forms, while infusing it with local content and conceptualizing the very essence of the landscape. Their work probes the Israeli place, grapples with the trauma of the Yom Kippur (1973) War, and outlines connections between the material painting and abstract, sublime spiritual realms. In doing so, the exhibition introduces a third school into the history of 1970s Israeli art—northern in character, whose members were bound by professional and personal ties, and whose sphere of activity extended between Haifa, Kibbutz Kabri, Safed, and Ein Hod.

The works from the 1970s are joined in the current exhibition by three projects from contemporary artists, whose underlying logic remains painterly, even though they materialize through drawing, installation, and video. These projects underscore the significance of the painting legacy of the 1970s, a legacy that struck deep roots in the history of local art, and continues to nourish contemporary practice, attesting to an ongoing artistic effort to explore affinities with Israel's beautiful yet complex landscape.

Artists
Ori Reisman, Michael Gross, Hannah Levi ,Rachel Shavit, Eliyahu Gat, Yehoshua Grossbard, Batya Grossbard, Hanna Megged, Claire Yanive, Tova Berlinski, Angeline Issayick, Iris Cintra, Karen Dolev, Sigalit Landau

Production of the catalogue and book were made possible through the generosity of Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies; Yoav Gottesman, London; Hanina Brandes, Tel Aviv; Orly and Philippe J. Weil, Tel Aviv; the Edelman Family; the Levin Family; Tambour; and additional donors who wish to remain anonymous

For the exhibition audio guide from the curators >> Click here