Moshe Gershuni
His teachers were Dov Feigin and Moshe Sternschuss, members of the "New Horizons" group, which during these years was beginning to lose the central place it had held in the world of Israeli art.In 1964 he married Bianca Eshel, who was also a student in the Avni Institute and a widow of an Israeli Air Force pilot who had been killed in the Sinai Campaign.On the walls of the museum were hung yellowish green abstract paintings in a geometric style, and throughout the space of the exhibition itself were strewn objects made of soft materials influenced by the sculptor Claes Oldenburg.Yona Fischer who, in his position as Curator of the Israel Museum during those years, encouraged these trends, in retrospect stated that "the understanding that conceptual activity was what was developing here was not yet fully focused.Instead of objectives with a commercial aesthetic, this genre adopted a freer relationship with minimalist values and emphasized the exposure of the process of the artist at work.[6] The work received broad public exposure because of a television reporter on Channel 1 who visited the exhibition and focused on Gershuni's sculpture as an uncompromisingly curious object.This activity was described in retrospect by Ilana Tannenbaum as an act of ars poetica, which voids and cancels out the action it performs, at the same time as it makes an ironic statement about the Israeli military.In the group of works that Gershuni created during the first half of the decade, content that diverged from questions of the characteristics of pure artistic representation began to appear.[10] The gap between the past and the present appears once again in his installation "Cypresses/Memories" (1971), which was displayed in The Artists House Tel Aviv, and which showed photographs from his childhood arranged on cut-down cypresses.The series of photographs entitled "The Main (Real) Problems are with the Tongue and the Toes" (1972) reveals Gershuni's interest in the body and corporeality as a topic of knowledge.In these self-portraits, Gershuni creates portraits by "mugging" in front of the camera, in a way that is parallel to contemporary American artists, such as Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, etc.Following the lead of Yitzhak Danziger, the spiritual father of many young artists of the 1970s, Gershuni participated in several performance art installations, which were called in those days "activities.""[11] These activities, that were political and social in nature, Gershuni developed in a kind of group that worked in the Hadera area, and which included Micha Ullman, Avital Geva, and Yehezkel Yardeni."[12] An example of the political involvement can be found in a 1974 manifesto which includes artistic declarations, such as combining different artistic disciplines and putting an emphasis on work processes, along with a political petition from Bezalel's teachers and pupils, including Gershuni, which called for the formation of an investigative committee to examine the government's "failure" in the Yom Kippur War.The exhibition included paper and photographs that had been treated with red paint, a color which was to become significant in Moshe Gershuni's work in the coming years.[16] Gershuni covered the face with transparent blue paint, like a kind of veil, and he drew on the lapel of his black garment a Star of David the edges of which were stained in red.In a series of works entitled "Arik Sharon and the Indians" (1979), Gershuni made use of a pickup truck with a man holding a rifle sitting on it.In other works of this period Gershuni colored the edges of the paper with red paint, staining them and adding texts like "Hello, Soldier" or "I'm coming."In this year Gershuni carried out an activity involving the sealing of the cracks in the space of the pavilion with red paint and then added objects connected to his own biography.In 1981, after several sexual experiments with men, Gershuni left his family and Ra'anana for an apartment and studio on Yosef ha-Nasi Street in Tel Aviv-Yafo.The exhibition - entitled "For Man and Beast are Creatures of Chance" - displayed the major series of Gershuni's works from the time he moved into the medium of painting.The meeting between these and Gershuni "the Jew" creates a space in which the old world order has awakened and "the aspiration toward the lofty is written in bodily fluids and systems of limbs.The wreaths, which in Western culture are perceived as symbols of victory and of mourning, appeared in Gershuni's works as self-contained images floating in empty space.On November 26, 1998, in a gallery used for artists workshops in Tel Aviv, a joint exhibition of works by Gershuni and the photographer Shosh Kormush.In the works he displayed in this exhibition Gershuni returned to the motif of wreaths, but this time he created them using a technique of obliterating the color from the surface of the painting by scratching it off with his fingernails.During his hospitalization Gershuni created an entire series of drawings he called "Ein Harod," in which he refers to the etymology of the word "haredah" (anxiety).A series of works that aroused great interest in the press in this regard was a group of drawings called "Summer 2009" that was displayed in 2009 in the Givon Art Gallery.The exhibition displayed a large series of papers, both small and medium in size, with images of light blue patches of color.The combination of biographical characteristics, homosexual sexual expression, and aggressive expressionism, have comprised his most noticeable examples of anti-modernism beginning in the 1970s."[38] In her article, ""The Want of Matter: A Quality in Israeli Art" (1986), Sarah Breitberg-Semel described Gershuni's work as conducting a complex, "two-faced" dialogue with Europe and its culture.