ORI GERSHT
“Revelations in the folds of time”

3 February - 3 April 2022

Press Release

Galleria Bianconi presents “Revelations in the folds of time”, the solo exhibition of artist Ori Gersht (Tel Aviv, 1967), curated by Ermanno Tedeschi and with the patronage of the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Israel in Italy.

As the curator Ermanno Tedeschi writes in the presentation text of the exhibition, the corpus of artworks by Ori Gersht “is imbued by that sensation of movement stopped inside the time frame. A painstaking arrangement of the elements being suddenly hit by an explosion. In this apparent violence, the artist immortalizes a serenity that goes beyond nature. He succeeds in bringing still life to life, capturing it in the infinitesimal moment in which it explodes and then rests on the ground, destroyed”. His artistic research has always explored the relationship between memory, history and landscape, adopting a metaphorical and seductive aesthetic language in which he tries to grasp the entropic tension between order and disorder, representing the conflict and violence inside history and hidden in the folds of reality.

The exhibition itinerary opens with two major works from his last cycle, Becoming, reflecting on the creation of a historical memory as it is presented and handed down to us by the great Western museums, in which the apparent order of the narrative actually hides debris, wrecks, fragments extracted from their original contexts.

To produce these works, Gersht decided to recreate an amplified narrative using postcards sold in the bookshops of great Western museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam... Using hundreds of postcards, he brings about a new order, prints each postcard on a glass sheet and places them one by one on a new “wall”, creating a new narrative and then destroying it. Afterwards he shatters the wall with an air rifle, and lets the camera capture this moment as a stream. As the artist himself declares, “a new type of visual space is generated in this way: a purely photographic space where past and future meet. This is the photographic ‘now’”. The same process is repeated in the works of the Flowers series, with which the exhibition continues. In this case, Ori Gersht creates exquisite still life installations, again referring to the pictorial tradition of Italian and Flemish art, then he extrapolates them from their original context to immortalize them just in the moment when they are blown up.

The exhibition ends with the room dedicated to Morandi. In these works, from the New Orders - Evertime series, Gersht reconstructs the still life theater typical of the Italian artist and then optically immortalizes it in the moment of its explosion. As Giorgio Morandi did, even Ori Gersht tries to go beyond the boundaries of mere exteriority, waging a battle against the ephemeral, the inconsistency and the superfluous, with an almost sacred ritual and care, to submit himself to the awareness that things fall apart.

Exhibition until 3 April

Mon - Fri 10 am - 1 pm / 2.30 - 7 pm

Sat 2.30 - 7 pm