30.04.2012 – 09.06.2012 Opening: Monday 30.04.2012 at 20:00
The exhibition "Pension" brings together two artists: Nahum Tevet and Gregor Schneider.
The name of the exhibition (in the Continental sense of a boardinghouse or small hotel) points to aspects of the experience it wishes to offer. It suggests a concrete place, a structure/institution inside which the activity that takes place is rest, and rest in the present context means being outside the world. Time in the work of each of these artists is a time of death, after things have lost their functionality.
This pointing by means of the exhibition's name to a type of structure also emphasizes the architectural dimension in the work of each of these artists, as well as Tevet's and Schneider's preoccupation, each in his own way, with the reciprocal relations between the body and the built-up space, the signified that surrounds it. Against this background, it is important to understand that the art of each of them, more than resting upon signs, generates a happening—a variable event for each and every viewer and concrete reference to the physical presence of the viewer's body.
The name of the exhibition also suggests the dimension of transience, the pension as hotel, as a space of temporary residence. Every changing art exhibition inherently marks its transience, but not every artist takes these conditions of display and turns them into one of the motifs of his work. Transience is a crucial aspect of the work of Tevet, whose sculptural installations have been characterized by no less a curator than Sarit Shapiro as a kind of camp that resists integration in any given architecture, but rather creates within it an unstable and therefore temporary and largely detached constellation. Schneider's preoccupation with transience, ever since he dismantled his home in 2001 and rebuilt it in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennial, is different and related to a conception of death as an ongoing—not terminal—event that is given expression through the dispersal of the house, or parts of it, all around the world. Until the house was dismantled it was called "House u r," whereas since it was rebuilt Schneider has called it "Dead House u r," and in many senses the death of the house continues to this day.
The present exhibition juxtaposes two types of sensitivities, two approaches that have profoundly impacted the artistic tone in and outside each of these artists' countries, and offers an experience of encountering life and the mundane from their other side.
Gregor Schneider: b. 1969, among the important artists of his generation, winner of the Golden Lion award, Venice Biennial 2001.
Nahum Tevet: b. 1947, among the influential Israeli artists of the 1970s; "One Thing at a Time," his retrospective exhibition in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2006), is considered by many a steppingstone in contemporary art.
- Ory Dessau
Brice Dellspreger Body Double 22
A new exhibition at the Hezi Cohen Gallery 30.04.2012 – 09.06.2012 Opening: Monday 30.04.2012 at 20:00
In the framework of the "Body Double" project, artist Brice Dellsperger has been recreating cinematic scenes. In all of these scenes, the original characters change their sex and are played by transvestites.
In the video work "Body Double 22," Dellsperger has taken Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" and replaced all of the characters with drag. The tattooed transvestite figure, sporting heavy makeup and piercing and wearing a variety of wigs, plays both roles—of both the man and the woman.
Kubrick's original work depicts the fantasy of a married couple, a game that takes place somewhere in-between reality and dreaming. Dellsperger takes the movie's illusion and multiplies it by presenting the transvestite's fantasy.
Brice Dellsperger: b. 1972; has been featured in various exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York, the Pompidou Center in Paris, and others.
