The Wax Museum: Approaching Celebrities

Saturday, 18.02.17, 20:00

Sunday, 15.10.17

:

Revital Silverman Grun

Accessible

More info:

04-60-30-800
Map

Share

The Wax Museum: Approaching Celebrities

The works in this exhibition engage with the subject of wax museums, in which wax sculptures of historic and famous figures are displayed. Visitors to wax museums can have their picture taken beside celebrities and "meet" their subjects of admiration, who are otherwise inaccessible in terms of time or place. Displays of wax sculptures existed before the invention of photography, when wax figures were molded based on paintings. Today, social media allow people to share their experience in real time, heightening the thrill of visiting a wax museum. Accordingly, the exhibition displays works that explore the emotional reactions of visitors viewing wax dolls and sculptures.

Susan Wides's Waxworld series inquires, through selective focus, skewed framing, and layers of exposure, where reality ends and illusion begins. In certain parts of the frame, where the large crowd is seen, the visitors can hardly be distinguished from the wax figures. In the foreground, the drag queen RuPaul can be identified as a representation of a celebrity arousing empathy, while embodying the unattainable achievements of a super-human.

Wax figures, sculptures, and doubles are the foundations of Sigmund Freud's theory of the Uncanny, which describes the experience of the familiar revealed as strange and threatening. The double motif is explored in Mike Kelley's and Paul McCarthy's video Heidi. The video production addresses the film medium, engaging human and mechanical doubles to expose cinema's "behind-the-scenes."

Shirley Siegal's work features wax heads drawn on a workshop bench: her self-portrait alongside portraits of other women who have influenced her over the years. Yet does the artist create art, or is it art that creates the artist? The sketches also raise the question of who gets to be exhibited in the wax museum.

The work by Johnathan Wertheim Soen and Lior Modan addresses the physical similarity between American author Ernest Hemingway and Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol. As a cultural hero in American folklore, Hemingway's familiar features are to this day celebrated in annual look-alike contests. In this work, the artists explore the significance of reproducing an image, in relation to sculptural reproduction.

Dana Levi presents live-size "reborn" dolls from the collection of a woman who lives on her own in a remote region of the United States. The collector fills her surroundings with hundreds of quasi-human dolls which she created herself. Her preoccupation with collecting, accumulating, and storing is evidence of an alienated, deprived existence, in which the dolls seem to provide a substitute for inter-personal relationships.

Nir Hod's self-portrait commemorates the transient and preserves the artist's features in perpetual youth. The wax sculpture represents the duality in his works, which shift between love and separation; between Eros and Thanatos. Wax is a preservative, but it can also melt.

Edna Ohana's work shows a wax figure that gradually melts away. This work simulates a “brain wash,” a cleansing process that wipes out identity and consciousness. The transformative potential of wax reflects a dissolving of all boundaries: between original and reproduction; between self and other; between life and death.

Curator: Revital Silverman-Grun

Participating artists: Nir Hod, Mike Kelley & Paul McCarthy, Dana Levy, Lior Modan & Jonathan Wertheim Soen, Edna Ohana, Shirley Siegal, Susan Wides 

For buying Tickets and further information please leave your details